I don't like limiting. In fact, I fear that if I were to limit my precious dirt guitar tracks they would run away crying about not being appreciated and I'd have to hint at marriage to get them to come back... I'm not fucking going through with it, though, that's just out of the question. They knew what they were in for when they started, end of discussion. Sometimes it's just best to leave things without that limiter on and just see what else you can do in terms of EQ, placement, additional tracking, et cetera.
Anyway, one thing that you may be missing is that each little part of your song needs its own little hole. First thing to try would be switching straight to fucking mono. I'm wagering you've a lot of mud on your hands and most things aren't popping out - this must be fixed, or your mission will surely fail. Tinker with anything you can (but not pan, as of course you don't have that) like EQ (to figure out what ranges are cluttered and what ranges are naked) or mild compression (if something is just popping all over the place in volume and you've no way to make it present apart from a bit of smooshie) so you can give each important thing its own very special happy place in the mix (hands above the bedsheets, though, not that special and happy just yet) and then move back out to stereo to see if you've completely butchered everything and need to scratch and do again. After this, look at the statistics for the whole thing and see what your average and peak volumes are - the trick is to have some difference between them so you have some dynamics (those are hard to get back in with EQ, PM jp22 for details) but have the peak pretty close to 0.0 so you're getting the most out of the volume you already have. If I recall correctly someone posted info from a couple of tracks off of Puritanical Misanthropic Euphoria and it was pretty much riding the top of the level the whole way through - that album makes me feel icky in my tummy wummy so I wouldn't quite go that far, but if that's the kind of 'loudness' you want then study that album.
After you have your total level as high as you can get without clipping, just mildly compress individual things with the highest peaks and see if you can tame them without killing dynamics completely. If you're getting better, try throwing mild compression over the whole mix to see if maybe that's better (of course, try dropping the compression on the highest peaks that you just added because compressing too many things just makes your mix sound like your compressor is jumping up and down on its bed and won't stop no matter how much you yell at it) - it could be that the stuff you've put in there is just too far all over the place to get that same perceived average loudness. Find whatever works best for you out of those two, then bypass the compression you just added and go on to the mastering limiter to see if your best results are better or worse than the stuff you did before. You don't want too many compressors most of the time because they don't always play nicely, and you don't want too much limiting because it's usually better to have that dynamic feel than that extra bit of loudness - which most people will never even use because of hearing damage risk and the inherent amplification capabilities of the vast majority of audio setups - but in the rare case that you do (like if you happen to be Dimmu Borgir, and Satan gleefully exchanges your soul for transients) just ignore screenshots because everyone here should also know that it's a no-no to just use a template without at least tweaking, tinkering, completely throwing out of the window, recovering from lawn and cleaning off, replacing, tinkering some more, and randomly bypassing with eyes closed the said template. You'll also want to make two versions of your mix, one with limiting and one without, and adjust the level of the two so that they sound about equal in volume - you'll of course hear louder as better just out of habit, so you want to get rid of that, and when that extra volume goes away you might just figure out why a lot of people just don't use L2.
Try that, if any of it makes sense, and post clips so we can figure out what you're talking about better.
Jeff
