To be honest, I think there’s a lot of psychology involved with high-end mastering gear. I don’t really see why distortion/saturation on the mix is acceptable when using something like the Elysia Karacter, but not the AH. I don’t see why running your whole mix hot through something cheap as hell like an Alesis Micro Limiter, and parallel processing it with the original mix wouldn’t be acceptable if it sounded good.