Prizzie Reid, mixing engineer for Usher and Alicia Keys, warns against a sneaky trap: plugins that jump in volume the moment you open them, tricking you into thinking a sound got bigger or better when it just got louder.
In R&B, the mix is a dance between elements, drums and bass, melody and vocal. A false volume boost on one piece throws off that whole balance without you realizing it.
His fix is to build his own level-matched presets for plugins prone to this, so every one starts at the same loudness as the untreated signal. That way any change he hears is really about tone or dynamics, not a volume illusion, giving him a clean baseline to judge if a move actually helps the song.