:-D I like the term noob friendly... as mentioned... digital fishphones has great plugins: Dominion, which is pretty good transient designer and saturator (but I think it's windows only), and the fishfilets, whitch are very useful Noise gate, easy to use compressor and deesser. Also everything mentioned above. You might also try Antress plugins. Most of people say shit about them, but thats because they are comparing them with proffesional ultra expensive plugins. Considerred as Freeware they are cool...
IF YOU WANT SUPERB FREE STUFF: Stillwell plugins. The Rocket is an 1176. Amazing!
Asking this question is just like asking which dick is better to fuck your own ass with.
Stillwell plugin are not free? Not sure why you think they are.
Yeah, Antress aren't too great in comparison to the fancy plugins, especially when you talk about their modeling plugins, which, as far as I'm aware, don't really sound like what they're modeling. But they're still good plugins, just throw any conception of them sounding like their hardware counterparts out of the window.