Reporting back to the group:
I spent 5-6 hours reading, working on Reaper templates, playing with options and landed on something that I think is useful for my workflow. One of the things that could possibly take MUCH more time is the choice of which compressors live on which buss for which reason. Obviously I have my favorites, but we all know that ReaComp is just not a bad option for us. (i.e.
http://reaperblog.net/2013/01/reacom...ressor-engine/ )
So, I set up 5 parallel busses for Lead Vox, then 4 or 5 busses for music. I saved my template and days later, dropped the template into a new project. It took 5 minutes to group/buss the tracks appropriately. The result was a sound that startled me. In a very good way, I was shocked that such a simple move on my part could make such an enormous difference to the song with such little effort.
This is certainly worth investing in. And, frankly I think that it's fun. I really HATE seeing all these folders and tracks and busses and such, but I don't know of another way to do this and not having 15 extra tracks. I guess I could hide some, but I hate to lose metering. Any ideas there?