musicroom
I want to throw a plug in for the SI Strings as well. Not quite EastWest, but I have been surprised at some of the sounds that can be tweaked from that VSTi. Again, sometimes more than one instance with different settings is always worth checking out if you're seeking richer sounds. They are all fairly light on the resources.

I have to second that.
I picked up SI when it first came out, mostly out of curiosity.
Bear in mind, SI was was conceived as a no frills VSTi to give new users a comfortable introduction to MIDI.
It's not deep. It's not supposed to be. That's the whole idea.
It's charm lies in its basicness.
The drums, EP, and bass are ok, and then there's this really nice string section. It responds well to keyboard input.
i personally believe that SI was a well executed project, and met its design target.
It's not complicated, it just does it's thing, and it does it fairly competently.

Beepster or others, I bought the Andy Johns kit a long time ago.  My issue is that if I try to load individual sounds from it—like a snare or a kick—I have to pick a flac file which plays at a very low volumes.  Some other kits have wavs that work well.  The kits with flac files will have a large number of files for each sound and loading just one sounds really bad.
 
How does one pull a single sound from Andy Johns into a kit?

hmm... I can't recall whether I've tried to use a single kit piece like that (been a while since I used SD3 with the AJ kit). If I remember I'll try it out.
 
However I'd imagine a brute force way around it would be to use two instances on SD3 (which IIRC is supposed to be pretty low impact as far as resources) and just write the MIDI drums so they send out to the correct instance.
 
I've had really good experience with customer support from Platinum Samples so maybe drop them an email to see what's up. They're the ones who put out that kit. You should definitely be able to mix and match without any weirdness AFAIK. Maybe you didn't download all the files and are working with a more basic version of it or there has been an update or something.
 
Now I'm curious.

gswitz
I'm a big Session Drummer fan. I use it much more than Addictive Drumz 2. It's fun and I'm used to it.
 
The SI one is fun too, but I'm faster at getting what I want with Session Drummer.

I thought having AD as an upgrade promo was very strange.  It's like saying our included drummer is not as good as this one.   Session Drummer does have a larger library. 

AD has those "miking options" like Room and Overhead, and a ton of effects and processors. It's more like Battery that way, except for not being able to load your own kits...which SD3 can do. Of course you can run SD3 with separate outputs and add as much processing as you want, but there's a high convenience factor with AD.
 
Personally I think the two complement each other very well.