I had a $4000 gear Trailer Trash pedal board that took me years of searching to get the sounds I wanted, lots boutique pedals. Used it for a few years of gigs in Austin. I sold it last year and have not regretted it. The only pedals I have kept are:
1) Klon Centaur (they are so hard to come by, why part with it? Still a great sound)
2) RC Boost (good for single coil gain/warmth into AXE II)
3) Bought an Analog Man Sun Face Germanium for certain fuzz things have not figured out how to dial in yet
4) Spa Quack wah by Pro-Analog, which is not hooked up/don't use...but is very nice and hard to reproduce in AXE II so far (one day will nail it, it's the taper and range I haven't figured out quite yet)
5) Ernie Ball Volume pedal which I don't use...
6) a Philosopher tone compressor pedal (a gift from a buddy) which is not in the board but useful for clean sustain and slide, pretty sure AXE could emulate it...
I use 1-3 above on my "new" pedal board, in line from guitar to before the Axe FX II (fuzz first, then RC Boost, then Klon for solos) , but everything else on it is controllers for the AXE II plus an MFC.
I have not missed one pedal I sold, all the tones can be created in the AXE II with some patient tweaking. I took some time to carefully do that for each pedal before I sold it, and once Axe Change is up and running can post those. One thing I noticed is that sometimes (rarely but on occasion) it helps to have a PEQ behind an AXE EFX block pedal to boost certain frequencies to get them to do a perfect A/B match. I am wondering if the new Tone Match feature Cliff has brilliantly designed is going to let us do that type of thing with pedals/applicable their. Won't that be great if so?
It just takes time to tweak. I am still not there on recreating all the good Robin Trower/David Gilmour Electric Mistress flanger sounds, but then again, I haven't had one around to compare things too.
For example, on the "Run Like Heck" preset, it does a GREAT job of dual delay for the David Gilmour stereo echo sound. Not easy to get with a single pedal at all in mono.
I especially like the X/Y function, so a drive pedal and do two things -- like Drive 1 is Fuzz (X), then Drive 1 becomes an Octavia (Y) at click of floor switch. Gives you lots of options to cram effects in.
If you don't mind turning knobs or using AXE Edit software to find your fav pedal sounds, you'll be fine with the AXE II and doubt you'll miss anything. Again, AXE-Change when it returns will be a GREAT resource for those scouring for certain sounds.
And let's not forget you can create NEW sounds altogether. That's another really cool thing about this box. No cables! No power/battery failures! play as much as you like!