I agree with most of your post until we get to:
Those combine the "same user interface, so everything is in the same place" with some visual identity to differentiate them at a glance. It's easy to try the different models and focus more on listening to it, rather than feeling you need to use it exactly like its hardware inspiration.
IMO this is a backwards way of looking at it. If I’m compressing drums, I’d know before I add a compressor what I want to achieve and I’d pick an appropriate piece of gear. I might just go straight to a dbx160 or 1176 or distressor. If I need to do something that none of those were ever designed to do, I’d reach for a flexible digital compressor. As soon as you strip away the original controls, look, ranges and layout of the originals, you may as well just use a typical versatile plugin compressor.
As we know, the difference between different compressors and EQ’s can be pretty small if they’re set the same - the main differences come from how we interact with them, and what controls have been exposed to the user. Making them more flexible and unified takes away at least 50% of the point of character models in the first place.
There isn’t a single instance where I’d reach for the stock logic compressor over dedicated models because none of the tweaks made improve them at all. Unifying the look of different models that are supposed to be different makes no sense to me - I’d even say the opposite is true. I’d find it more useful to have the different models as visually distinct as possible, with each having an optimised control set and layout for its intended use. As soon as you start trying to unify stuff, I’d rather just use Pro C2 (or whatever).
Your "eight 1176 compressors" scenario is easily solved by giving each of those compressors some visual identity. It can be anything from colored tape to stickers to painting the front panels. See e.g the UA 1176 collection, each variant is a bit different:
No. The different 1176 models are different circuit revisions and sound and behave differently. They are not interchangeable with just different paint. Typically you’d put masking tape and label them. Regardless, gear looking different is useful to the user, not a hinderance. If all analog gear had the exact same look, regardless of what it’s doing, it would be a nightmare.
Let's not forget that a lot of hardware design is based on things like "what can fit into this chassis", "let's put this pot here so there's short wiring for less noise" type compromises rather than some grand plan for ideal usability. Like imagine if a digital model of a Lonestar Classic required you to flip the virtual amp around so you can access its spring reverb controls. That would suck just as much as it does on the real amp.
Again, not really. It might happen on some amps or valve gear with high voltages but if we look at studio gear and music gear on the whole, it’s rarely at the expense of the users experience. The product simply wouldn’t hit the market if they thought of the controls and layout as some kind of afterthought. Guitar amps are somewhat of an anomaly because the the size, voltages, need to be portable, and other constraints that are somewhat unique to them.
