[Dean Roddey]

It's a hard thing to quantify really. But with the ability to fix all timing issues and punch in the smallest mistakes and EQ things very heavily and compress everything to the point that nothing ever pokes its head up, it just seems to me that it looses something.

Maybe that's not so applicable to your genre. Most metal type stuff seems to be very precise and highly compressed, and the super-high gain guitars are already very compressed naturally to begin with. So maybe it's what's expected for the folks you are catering too, I dunno.

I do think that the comment above that perhaps, in the quest for separation and removal of mud, a little too much of the body of it has been removed, so that it's a little hollowed out maybe.

Maybe it's your mixing setup. Is your room really well treated and have you taken the time to measure it and set up your listening position correctly for optimal bass response? If not, then perhaps the reason it sounds good to us, even scooped out, but muddy to you, is that you have some significant bass response issues in your room, and you are trying to EQ these peaks out, and effectively removing too much.