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It isn't always about whether or not the drums are recorded well or even sound good on their own. Sometimes after tracking basics, an arrangement may evolve or even change directions. At that point a sound that worked initially and has real sonic merit on its own, just isn't the best for the song at this stage. You can engineer a quality recording of a banjo to death and it ain't gonna sound like a nylon guitar (well, that may be worth a challenge haha). Sometimes you get to the end and realize the nylon timbre works better. So augment or replace a kick drum sound. I mean, if you're willing to try to eq and compress it to death anyway, are you getting the true sound of the kick drum? In a perfect world we could all perfectly predict where a given song is gonna end up sonically in the tracking stage but the beauty of music is one can alter course and react to inspiration and sonic events as they take shape. My 2 cents.
Whatever it takes to make it cool. Sometimes you use a weird mic, or odd placement. That's not natural either, right? Same deal :-)
Some recordings require the natural sound of events in the room, some morph into a call for a different color.
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