I had the exact opposite experience. 5 minutes after getting my first Fractal unit I had a more realistic AC30 tone than I had ever gotten after 5 years of tweaking with Helix, simply by pulling up the Fractal AC30 on default settings and picking the stock 57+121 factory IRs. No EQ, no high/low cuts, no tweaking to get the high end right, just effortless natural accurate tones.
The artist I work for uses Helix because that's what I was using in 2018 so they made the switch for the whole band, and every time I boot up that unit during production rehearsals or at a show I can't believe how sterile it sounds on the factory presets and the presets I spent years dialing in. It's insane to me that the original amp models never get updated, even as they release newer amp models with "better" modeling.
Just like the endless tweaking to get the high end right on the amps, on the wet fx I'm constantly tweaking things to get the mix right, whereas on Fractal everything effortlessly blends together and sits well with the dry, just like with real amps & pedals or plugins. The quality of Fractal's wet fx are so much better too, particularly the reverbs; Helix's reverbs are a joke by comparison and the latest algorithms use a ridiculous amount of the DSP.
Also no multiple parallel paths, fixed linear signal path, no block bypass dry through options, buggy annual firmware releases, no block channels, the editor GUI is terrible i.e. the parameters are bars that extend the entire length of the window instead of the industry standard knobs/faders. As a result you're able to display far fewer parameters at once in the window which requires scrolling down, which would be fine except that the parameter values are also affected by scrolling with the mouse so unless you scroll in a certain tiny area on the right side of the window when you try to scroll down you mess up the parameter values, etc....