Sorry for the really late reply; life has thrown some serious curve balls my way but I'm kind of back on track.
 
Anyway, thank you all for your thoughts on compressors. I thought it might be fun to just have a conversation about them. I use both the 1176 & LA-2A plugins a lot, as well as the Sonitus & Cakewalk stuff. As many have noted, they all have their own personalities and areas where they shine. I experiment with them all when I'm mixing, and just usually go with the one that sounds the best to me on that track on that particular day. So it's all over the place.
 
I have thought about picking up a couple of the ~$500 hardware clones for use during recording, but the budget is just not there right now.
 
Gotta run. Thank you all, again, for jumping in!

Wow, lots of great replies. I'm going to have to try sidechaining with that Sonitus compressor.
 
As it stands, I jumped into CbB by exporting a couple of projects as raw stems from my previous DAW of choice and then doing as much mixing as I could using the ProChannel modules (incl. CA-2A, which I got as a freebie), so I am another who thinks the ProChannel compressors are pretty nice.
 
My workhorse everyday compressor has long been Meldaproduction's MCompressor, the one that comes in their Free Bundle, which I finally registered. Surprisingly versatile, it's still my go-to for sidechaining. You can adjust the RMS of the detector, the knee, the EQ of the detector, all sorts of stuff, the usual Meldaproduction feast of features. I learned the fine art of tweaking compressors on it, and its meter is still my favorite graphical representation of compressor settings and operation, and it's the one I use when I'm teaching someone how to use a compressor.

I might be crazy but I'm still using the crap out of Sonitus effects. I have messed around a bit with other compressors but Sonitus has just happened to become my goto.

E: probably because of the simple interface that helped me understand compressors and their inner functions early on

CA - 2A. No doubt.