The gate is just about the best in the business imho… nothing like it on toms…
Agree the gate is really good, even the one in the strip can often be enough.
The DeEsser is another gem, I use it a lot on acoustic guitar to dampen fret noise.
yeah the new de esser IS very good… i wish the reduction meter was more visible to those of us with colour vision problems… i do prefer the UAD Precision de esser though.
I cant even think of a Cubase stock plugin I hate
lol i can… most of the modulation effects… and the stock compressors aren’t great either… the new ‘tube’ comp isn’t too bad and the old one is transparent enough but uninspiring, the vintage comp is just weird, it seems to suck the life out of the mid range in guitars and snares in a really unpleasant way, but then again i’m just being a spoilt brat cos i’m comparing them to things like the UAD2 1176 collection and the UAD/Waves dbx160s which just have bags of ‘vibe’.
For my own personal tastes, and that’s really what it’s about at the end of the day, i find most of the modulation effects a bit ‘tame’ and just not quite convincing enough, Audified have a free phaser which destroys the stock one… mod machine is the exception to the bunch though, it’s quite mental 
Again though i’m being massively critical here… perhaps this is something Uncle Steiny could look at for C9? Instead of that new ‘mind controlled telepathic VST connect’ and loopmash XL they have in the pipeline they could just concentrate on further stability and beefing up what’s already there.
Going back to the gate… the only thing i don’t like about it is the GUI… it’s seriously fugly! Can’t knock it on functionality though!
The stock compressor is nice when you want transparent and clean compression … I rarely want that tbh but for side chain compression it’s perfect 
yea you are right there I have no use for vst connect because I am offline usually except for updates and I don’t care for loopmash
I use Cubase’s deesser both in channel strip and as plugin side-chained as a frequency band ducker -e.g. kick ducking bass only between 60 and 100Hz and leaving rest of the bandwidth untouched - clears up the mix significantly without causing pumping as compression sidechaining might cause.
Great idea!
+1