Genuine question! The way I see it, gain is a budget, and normalizing just makes you start the game with lots of money in the bank.
I get it, you also raise the noise floor and the resolution is diminished a bit, but is that REALLY that big of a deal? Does that signal loss really matter that much? I thought that was the whole point of having much higher bit-rate effects processing was that you just had an order of magnitude less things to give a shit as long as the levels sounded right (and of course your monitoring situation was reasonably well-calibrated).
Is this just a pristine aud