I seem to wander between the extremes you mentioned, I love pristine ambient stuff, (sound of a single water drop breaking the surface of a pool in a cave) and then I like hissing screaming punk raunch… So I do both and try to do most everything in between. Its all there for the making. Niches are for nerds! I used to run stuff through an old noisy analog board when mastering the noisier genres, for that warmth… I smoked a few speakers too in my day, turned one bass amp cabinet into a smouldering stinking ruin, it was fun, oh but it was a rental, so that was not so fun! 