I'd be interested in trying some of your patches then, maybe I could learn something, so far I'm finding that trying to blend gain is just sounding like... Scratchy and harsh I guess. I did say that I am no expert in setting up bass patches - with guitar (real amps and pedals) I set amps with as much gain as I can before I can't clean it up with the volume on the guitar anymore - usually 50%-80% depending on the amp, and then set dirt pedals to 80% volume and 20-30% gain, but this doesn't work on Zoom pedals for me. I'm having to work on different principles of gain staging to get this to work for me I think. It's a learning curve.I don't find this to be the case at all. I use the B3n SVT amp model and cab sim, set with the gain of the SVT adding a small amount of grit/hair, and often couple this with a front end drive model. Certainly depending on what you're looking for, YMMV, but I find that the front end drives on the B3n are a strong point, especially compared to the B3 which gave me nothing but misery in the overdrive/distortion department.
FWIW, I'm getting pretty much exactly the results I expect to get. YMMV. I'm also able to get a pretty wide variety of tones and overdriven sounds using many different combinations of drive models in front of amp models and cab sims. And all without too much trouble, ether.
I guess we can chalk this up to a lot of things, not the least of which is that different players will be looking for different things in their gear, which may be more easily obtained favoring one piece of gear over another. No knock on anyone that doesn't prefer the B3n. Though I've never played the GT-1B, I'm pretty sure I could get some nice sounds out of it, but I'd be shocked if the tonal differences and drives would be night-and-day so much better than the B3n.
Of course, I think the B3n is more buttery, less creamy, and has those ever-elusive haunting mids that I crave.
Not sure what you mean here. Mixing the cabinet BALance parameter to 0 is essentially defeating the cab sim altogether. Could you elaborate with more detail exactly what your process is? When you're finished with a tone creation on the B3n, where do you find your cabinet sim BALance value? I find that I prefer this setting to be around 80 with dirty/grindy tones. Much lower than that and the dirt starts to sound very unnatural.
Through an amp I set the cabs to near 0 (maximum 20) so you get the flavour of the cab sim through the real amp and cab, but through the speakers I set them 90-100 so they can do their job.
The difference with the Boss is that everything "just works", I flick the global output setting to line-out and nothing needs major adjustments, high gain pedal tone blends with gainy amps etc without having to keep fiddling with parameters.
It seems to be fair to compare them to apple and Android - ios "just works" while android requires some more user knowledge (especially older versions of Android but I digress) and has more that you can do wrong as a result, but ultimately can be used to achieve more...
I think the biggest thing for me though is that I can get more compete patches on the Boss without sacrificing a delay because i want an EQ in the chain, while the Zoom limits my patches. It's a shame that a B5n is unlikely but still, the B3n is a huge step up from what was available before it.
I have considered chaining the B3n and the B3 or the MS70 CDRto get around this though, and use the B3 or MS for compression/limiter, delay and reverb.
Regardless, opinions are opinions and I think the GT -1B sounds better over all, both into an amp and into speakers, but I'll carry on learning to dial in on both and post any further thoughts.
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and compared to a lot of rigs I see over at TGP it's relatively cheap too! Not cheap to me though 
