I hear you man. Your post made me laugh.Everyone has a different gig so it makes sense what works for some won't work for everyone. It also depends on where you are as a musician. Are you an entertainer performing for a living? A bedroom player hitting up the Monday metal Jam? a gigging cover band getting % of sales?
Regardless of where you are, I think your stage volume should never be more than the acoustic volume of your drummer's kit. IMO If you really want it louder for personal reason's you should go In-Ears instead of destroying the stage mix for everyone else or, killing the first few rows of unlucky patrons getting the cone of deaf from your 4x12 cabinets, and making it impossible for the sound engineer to reinforce you to the audience...... Just my opinion after 27 years of learning about sound reinforcement.
I wanted to add to this as well. I have worked with hearing protection my entire life. In one of my previous bands, the drummer and bass player do not and have never used protection. These 2 guys together are beyond tone deaf and it's really quite sad. For example, The drummer thinks on many studio recordings that the kick drum is doing 4/4, hitting every beat, when the reality is it's the bass guitar while the drums are kick / snare / kick / snare, but he's so deaf he can't distinguish the difference, the result? people actually clear the dance floor cause no one can get into it, it's like double bass all night long....... Now the Bass player isn't as bad, but he consistently sings out of tune because of it. Guess what both their answers are to deal with it? PLAY HARDER, PLAY LOUDER, SMASSSSHH! The drummer breaks sticks left right and center he hits so hard just so he can hear himself, and the bass player is probably double the volume he should be at. I tapped the mains from our desk a few times and recorded the FOH mix and the results showed little to no drums or bass in the PA at all because they were already loud enough on stage. Now, in order for the guitars to hear ourselves, we had to turn up as loud as them, THEN our vocalist needs her monitor to be on top of all of us so she can hear herself...... I'm sure by now you see where this is heading. So now that everyone is so loud that sound engineer can't even create a FOH mix without foldback because we are only playing a 150 person room, we are going to sound like shit all night to the audience and venue, no matter how happy you "personally" are on stage.
anyways, I'm sure most of us have been there..... it's no fun.
I remember turning up to a band audition once with my 5 Watt valve amp, which is pretty loud. The band leader ( the drummer) said no way, and he plugged me into this 150W amp and cab, and put me in front of it. Before he starts to play , the drummer puts on these big headphones to cover his ears. Then I knew what was coming.
I was deafened through the entire audition, couldn't hear a thing of the other musicians, ears ringing for 2 days afterward.
Great fun...