When you produce it's important that you can constantly feel the beat, so that you can move and become rhythmically and harmonically attached to the track. I'm not sure getting things to clip is good advice.Me neither, but currently I find that drums need to be treated very tightly right from the start, so that you have a great beat to build the production on. With hard kick drum beaters and harsh sounding snares, that can be very challening, but with such a hard grip it becomes easier with those kinds of sound sources. I think that works because with the limited conditions of making that type of sound pleasant, warm, big and soft, you have to find a way through that and to some degree overdo all the filter settings. I used to always mix against no limiter on the mix bus, well it turns out I'm more and more drawn towards the opposite, mixing towards a tight overall compressor grip and when I'm done I loosen the grip until the mix falls into place.
It's the same with room and overhead mics, don't make them too loud in the mix. The problem is that when the mix gets limited, the effects will turn too loud and make it sound blurry. I also think that one should be very careful not to overdo reverb and delay on drums. I find reverbs on drums requires some frequency selection, I guess scooping out the mids on an EQ placed in before a reverb and delay and having that in parallel on ultra mild configuration is pretty good, in my experience it's a bit easier to primarily rely on the room and overhead mics and processing those efficiently for ambience. I'm not sure if I would put it straight on the raw signal, I would at least avoid that. I'm currently pretty excited about the Chris Lord Alge extension for SSD 4. The groove is critical to a great sounding mix and for that you have to get those low end rhythm sound sources like kick, snare, bass, percussion, toms cut through much enough, yet soft enough. These days I prioritize the drum and percussion (rhythm) element as nr 1, with that you get a powerful foundation. It ultimately allows you to get a smoother transient balance and with that comes gained mix signal and size. Side-chaining is almost like a way of prioritizing sounds in the mix, it's almost better than the volume faders. I also think that various side-chaining techniques are worth a lot when it comes to making drums sit in the mix. The drums need to be soft enough in order to make the listener attached to the mix. One technique I've used lately for kick and snare in general has been to beat the crap out of them until it clips, fine tuning the frequencies towards softness, definition and punch in that hard grip and then loosen the compressors' grip on them until they are big, warm and emotional in the mix. It's all about taking those small sounding raw samples and making them sound big and real, and that's challenging. I think the trick is to mix every kit piece separately on dedicated FX chains, in solo until they really sound stunning all by themselves, as if each kit piece were the main instrument in the track. EZdrummer has in my experience been very challenging to make great sounding.