How many guitars are enough ?
Is an L6 POD "enough" or does one need an 11 Rack ? Is that still not enough ? Does one need an Axe II ?
People that have cab packs, that enjoy spending time tone shaping etc are obviously going to tell you "NO", the stock cabs aren't enough. Obviously though not every single Axe owner is buying cab packs, just as there are surely still Axe owners who are happily using FW9, while the forum faithful are updating to the latest FW19 beta.
There are some great IR's in the factory offerings, and if I had to, I could happily live with the. However, there are also some very nice cab packs, and as I am a bit OCD about options, and have the disposable income for such things, I buy most of them, and have CL etc
That said, I still use some of the factory offerings quite often.
Your OP message asked if "everyone is in agreement" and I'm pretty sure that no, not every single Axe user is working only with cab packs
Have you exploited all the factory cabs yet? You can blend 2 different cabs in many ways and one or more combinations will sound perfect with this amp/effects preset while a different one will sound awesome with another amp/effects preset. Fully explore what you have first then, move on from there.
My issue has been time ! I found my playing suffering because of all the time I spent on tweaking left no time for practice! (It's a big rabbit hole and if you get caught up in it (with no practice time, very frustrating)you will lose more than you gain!
If Fractal was selling "new amp sims" would you buy them? There are literally unlimited ways to mic a cabinet and FAS is saturating the importance of IRs more than anything ever has. Therefore IRs and mic-ups are literally getting more attention now than ever before.
Your IR choice is the most important part of your signal chain. If you take that Groove3 mix lesson of how I build my professional mixes you'll see that after choosing the right IR there is no need for post processing.
Yes but, on the CPU strained patches I find cutting one of the 2 cabs resolution down solves the problem unless you are in the studio and need UR! I do use CL3 and buy IRs but find that setting different cab block parameters on two cab blocks yields sound not possible otherwise!Blending in the ax costs in terms of cpu. Isn't it true that blending with the cab edit program saves on cpu as apposed to using two cabs in axe?