Well, glad to hear I am not nuts, anyway.
Here is some extra detail regarding some of these questions from a good friend who is a logic expert extraordinaire. Anyone living in NYC who wants logic tutorials let me know and I will send you his way...
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- It is easy to insert a Gain plug in on all tracks - just drag across all tracks in the mixer and then insert one Gainer, and they will all have the plug in the same spot. But this still requires you adjust each track's Gain plug-in individually so even though it might be useful, it doesn't answer your question. You could insert one Gain plug-in on one track, set it's trim to, let's say, -3 db, and then Command-Option drag the plug-in to all tracks -- this copies the plug-in with it's settings......
- In any Native (not TDM) mixer, the audio is floating point after the input and prior to the output. This means that those are the only two places in the mixer where clipping actually may cause audible distortion (here it is fixed-point math). What that means in practical terms is that the dynamic range of channel strips, and busses within the mixer (between input and output), is huge - practically impossible to distort even when the meters show red. Knowing this should take away the concern about individual channels clipping, though I always still to try to practice good gain-staging as a general rule.
- One way of dealing with the output meter clipping, where distortion does matter, is to simply lower the output channel strip by the amount of clipping. But using sub-grouping (submixes) prior to the output is probably a better mixing technique, and because of the floating point math, you won't be losing lots of resolution by trimming sub-grouped auxes. At the very least you could simply subgroup all tracks to a single bus/Aux prior the output - this is as easy as selecting all tracks in the mixer and changing the output assignment of any one of them
- It's a little hard for many people to accept that trimming a sub-group aux prior to the output is just the same as trimming all the individual tracks' automation. This is probably due in part to the fact that Pro Tools TDM (HD) systems are _not_ floating point -- they are fixed-point math throughout, and you do not want to clip channel strips, TDM plug-in inputs, etc. It would be nice to be able to group things like automation trim in Logic, but right now when you group automation, all tracks' automation moves the same absolute value, not a relative trim - not particularly useful. As i mentioned, Subgrouping is fast and easy in Logic's mixer, because of the automatic creation of aux channels with correctly set inputs when you utilize a bus..."