Say whatever you want about modeling, but one angle I don't see discussed all that often about great modelers is how much they can teach you about guitar tone in general.
Diving into Fractal's ecosystem has taught me 10x more about guitar tone than all the forums reading and music store jamming I've ever done combined. Most people will never have anything close to a decked out studio full of the best gear money can buy, all cabled up and integrated into a completely functional switching system so you can truly compare apples to apples and learn how guitar tone is actually created and what part of the chain is doing what to your sound, ON TOP OF being able to basically put any of those pieces of gear into the hands of a virtual tech who can work in real time and do things a real tech and amp couldn't even hope to achieve.
You can easily and just about instantly answer questions like "How does input filtering impact the sound." "What exactly do transformers do to the sound and what is the difference between larger and smaller ones." "How does negative feedback impact the sound and what does more or less of it sound like." "What if I could add another gain stage or clipping diodes into that amp's preamp, is it better to have more gain stages and set the gain lower or fewer gain stages and set the gain higher." "What if I could add/remove/put a new resistor in the bright cap." "What if I could put amp X's tonestack into amp Y." "Do 'hotter' biased amps actually sound more aggressive and better like every wive's tale says or will a colder bias actually get me where I want to go." How about I find all this stuff out in in 5 seconds each while I turn the knob and listen. "Do I actually like amp X over amp Y or is it just that when I played amp X, I was using a different cab and was in a different room, and turns out those were the things I liked more." and a million other things.
I feel like Fractal alone has given me a University degree's worth of info I wouldn't otherwise have, that I went on to apply to analog gear when I use that as well. In that sense, Fractal gear is immeasurably valuable to me.
The other thing about modeling is that it encourages you to think like an engineer. Modelers encourage you to think of your tone as everything between your fingers and the PA speakers or studio monitors, where most analog-rig guys (though not most forums guys, admittedly) only think of "their tone" as existing between their fingers and the speaker out jack of their amps, with most players thinking cabs are only necessary to make the amp loud, but are otherwise unimportant to tone in general. This sentiment is changing now, but I believe it's primarily changing because modeling has shown all of us how vitally important and influential cabs are to the tone shaping process.
Anyway, when the die hard analog guys try modelers, they're suddenly forced to deal with picking from a ton of cabs and mics, and then hearing a mix-ready version of their tone as opposed to an amp-in-the-room version and it throws them hard. Modelers usually make you deal with a multitude of cabs, mics, and post processing, which can be intimidating, but it's no different than what any player would already have to deal with if they wanted to make their tone sound good through any PA or mix. It's just that most analog guys never need to think that far into the chain.
Modeling does require a bit of a different approach than tube rigs, for sure. With most analog rigs, what you have is all there is, so you tend to work "outward" with them, which means seeing what you can do with them, finding everything possible, tweaking like crazy, etc. Most modeling rigs can do pretty much everything though, so if you take that approach, you'll tweak forever, which is basically the #1 complaint I read about modelers, tonal opinions aside. Instead you kind of have to work "inward" and narrow down what you want from infinite possibilities. You can ultimately arrive at the same place, but you kind of have to get there from a different direction.
Moral of the story: use both. They both have different sets of strengths and weaknesses, but both can get you exactly where you want to go if you learn how to approach them, and both can teach you things the other can't.
