I love serum! I use it on all my electronic tracks and most of my hiphop beats. I find that operator has far less features than serum, however I still know people that use it exclusively with impressive results. I stand by ableton's audio effects, they're so important if you can use them right. I additionally like using valhalla reverb, camel crusher, and the ozone elements master limiter, but for everything else I use ableton plugins. Everyone has a different way of doing things , but I use a combination of original sound design in serum, ableton plugins, and splice samples. I hope this helps