Better Late than Never - I suppose

After all these years of making music as a hobby, I am finally making progress as far as sound quality and overall production. The most important lesson I've learned recently is:

Not Every Track Has to be Live
I have always attempted to keep every virtual synth track 'live', avoiding bouncing or freezing tracks. But this eliminates the possibility of achieving sounds that are simply impossible to get from modulation, effects, etc. Modulating a synth, freezing it, then chopping, effecting, reversing chunks of it produces results that cannot be achieved with 'live' tracks. The discovery of subprojects in Reaper makes this technique easy and enjoyable and powerful.

Along these lines...
I've always done 'post production' by simply adjusting volumes or EQs on my tracks, and that's it. With my current song, I will do just like above. I will render the song into tracked out WAVs and load them into a post-production project. There I can clean them up all the way down to the individual points on each WAV if I wanted. At that point in production those rendered tracks should be pretty stable so ideally they won't have to be re-rendered.

We'll see how it goes.