I've been looking at the implementations of several open source audio plugin suites (airwindows, bluelab, calf, lsp, and tap) to see what I can learn about how they do different dsp effects.
Some plugins follow a "unix philosophy" of doing just one thing well, which allows a musician to stack them in various ways. A lot of the airwindows plugins are like this.
Other plugins are more monolithic, with multiple effect stages built in. For example calf bass enhancer has the following stages: input gain -> low pass filter -> tap tube saturation -> another low pass filter -> optional high pass filter -> output gain.
Looking at the latter example, I thought it might be interesting to develop a bass enhancer plugin, but with some additional options in the saturation stage. Maybe it would be nice to have an option to pick a tape saturation effect instead. Then I wondered about what's the point of even developing a new plugin? I could do this with a combination of airwindows plugins stacked in my DAW, and then I don't need yet another plugin.
On the other hand, it is nice to have a single component that solves a specific problem (In this case - "My kick drum needs more oomph").
Do people tend to prefer smaller composable "unix-style" plugins, or larger "monolithic" plugins?