Hey, nice sounding stuff already, Cerendir! I believe you can make this work rather well.
About Antress Fairchild, you are talking the latest version, Fire Chainer? It has few "factory" set attack and release values that you can choose from the knob. Values themselves read on the GUI. Also Bootsie's Density Mk.II has this similar approach. I personally use more his older black skinned version that had dedicated knobs for attack and release. It is little funky but has nice not so usual attack and release curves that can be useful. Truth to be told I haven't used it much lately..
Also if you are using SeventhSign, you should notice that attack and release speeds work backwards. Highest value in the far right is the fastest.
Apart from using your ears you can also use some oscilloscope plugin to really see what compressor is doing to the waveform, especially to transient peaks. I use smartelectronix s(m)exoscope for that but I've been demoing Schwa's Schope and I will probably buy it, as it is just so nice all-in-one type solution. And using different comps in serial can also do wonders. And also you can use some limiter to chop off excessive sharp peaks if they bother you.
About saturation, when you use it as an fx, it is very useful on individual tracks but also on drums+bass sub channel (put them both under the same parent folder), for example. Just think of it like multitrack record, they used to record individual tracks on red, not just master. And not all sounds like tape saturation. At least my vocals can get tubby and "dead" with it.
Easiest way to get decent roomy guitars out of ampsims, for me at least is to use some special impulses that have done further from the amp, thus having that room tone in them. I have couple of free ones that work quite well. They are from noisevault etc. so if you are interested, PM me.
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