The majority of the time, I find myself doing a lot of 4:1 and All In. Either or. Rarely 2:1, 8:1, or 20:1. I used to mash a lot, as one of the reasons the 1176 works great on drums, but poorly on 2 bus, is that it’s fast and it likes to dig into whatever its compressing.
I don’t use it for smooth soft transparent vocals. It IS beautifully transparent in my opinion, but they’re the wrong flavor of transparent for ultra soft sensitive stuff. Prefer Shadow Hills, Manley, and Fairchild emulators for those. Sometimes LA-2 plugins because of the fixed, slow, asymmetrical release.
I’d be curious to hear thoughts from others on any of this too.