PodFarm free isn't useless at ALL to me, hell! It's FREE, stable and I don't get any appreciable latency when MONITORING through it while taking DI's so I have a near perfect solution to the problem of what to monitor through without getting all stupid with my chain!
It's good enough for monitoring, that's for damn sure.
Instead of using my POD and listening to that through an extra stage of conversion I can just go:
guitar > pro48 > interface > cubase!
Booooom. My buddy and I actually pretty much nailed the Oceano tone a few weeks ago (well, maybe not nailed but it was super similar. We both looked at each other from across the room and were like 'OCEANO! lol) using his Ibanez 7 w/EMG-81-7's which is an amazzzzing sound guitar!