Man, my experience is SO opposite to the above. I designed Axe-Fx II bass presets for some of the biggest tours in the world and everyone — artist, monitors, front-of-house — has been blown away. I've also worked one on one with many bass player customers, including amateurs and big name pros (some from the artist page, others who chose not to be public endorsers) and I've never had anyone think the tone wasn't killer. For me the Axe-Fx (and AX8) is the secret weapon of bass.
One of the best days of my career at Fractal Audio was dialing in a "multi-band" bass preset with engineer Paul Northfield, who worked on my favorite Rush albums. That preset had a DI, a bass amp, and a guitar amp. We phase aligned everything with precision delays (cab block, compressor look-ahead). That's been the model for everything I've done since.
Another thing I'll tell you that in the name of "consistency" I've been asked to make a fair number of custom IRs and tone matches of bass devices including some of the ones you named above. (Sorry, I can't share these, as they are the property of the artists who use them.) This works just fine if that's what you like, but I never found the tone to be "better" using this method -- just "right and ready" for a given band or mix.
One of the best days of my career at Fractal Audio was dialing in a "multi-band" bass preset with engineer Paul Northfield, who worked on my favorite Rush albums. That preset had a DI, a bass amp, and a guitar amp. We phase aligned everything with precision delays (cab block, compressor look-ahead). That's been the model for everything I've done since.
Another thing I'll tell you that in the name of "consistency" I've been asked to make a fair number of custom IRs and tone matches of bass devices including some of the ones you named above. (Sorry, I can't share these, as they are the property of the artists who use them.) This works just fine if that's what you like, but I never found the tone to be "better" using this method -- just "right and ready" for a given band or mix.