I'm a firm believer that if you have good ears, you can make anything sound good. I'm a huge fan of the Fractal stuff, I've had the Axe FX II, the FX8 and now have the Axe FX 3. My friend has an ultra and a Helix and he has made them sound stellar - even the Ultra sounds miles better than most guitarists who play locally around here, because he knows what he is listening for.
We have 2 studio mastering engineers in my band and, using their advise and learning from them has made my gear sound absolutely awesome live, through small Pioneer XPRS systems, to the big Martin Audio rig we use and the line arrays we hook up to in theatres. You can make the Axe FX as simple or as complicated as you like, but in my experience, less is always more and the danger is, ending up after hours on end tweaking, all your amps sound the same. The reason I guess, is because people haven't actually heard an "XYZ" amp live in the first place, so don't know what they are listening for ?
I learned a long time ago (when I ran a G System with 2 Mesa Mark Vs and before that with 2 x Genz Benz El Diablo 100's) that not only do amps sound different depending on model, manufacturer, configuration etc, they also sound different even between the same models*.
The Axe 3 is super simple now to get a great tone. I find myself hardly ever using low and high cuts in the cab blocks or messing around with Input Trim, Hardness, Pick Attack like I used to on the II XL+, just bass, mid, treble, gain, level and thats about it. When I compare the Axe 3 to my G System + Stereo Amp setup, its digital routing has made the impossible, possible. No more 300 feet of cabling in 5 cable method (or even 7 cable method), ISP Decimator noise suppression, hum eliminators, input buffers, line drivers (that suck the tone) and my back is thankful for it.
I suppose the moral to my story is when dialling in a preset is "do not make perfection the enemy of the good"... most of the time just a few minor adjustments are needed to get killer tone and learn to stop fiddling. If you don't like what you hear after about half an hour of tinkering, you most likely wouldn't buy that amp anyway if you demo'd it in a shop.
* I remember a thread on here about John Petrucci's amp and people dialling in his Mesa EQ curve and complaining it didn't sound quite right. My Mesa Mark V's (both of them) were EQ'd different to each other get them to sound the same and my friends Mark V is EQ'd different to both of mine to sound like mine. In the analogue world nothing is identical, similar yes but not identical. Components vary in amp manufacturing I guess where software doesn't ?
Anyway, I'm rambling, have a great day everyone.