Natural snares are fucking IMPOSSIBLE to get right. For me, at least, it comes down to pure luck. There have been times where the snare has sounded pretty bad in the room, sounded even worse through the close mic, yet when it came time to mix it all.. it somehow worked, and I managed a totally natural snare that everyone loved. Other times I can spend an hour on the tuning, another hour on the mic'ing and still can't get it sounding anything close to passable, even though it's sounding far better in the room and through the close-mic.
Was surprised not to see anything about saturation in there. Do you not use any saturation besides Nebula?
Also, i highly recommend the SPL Transient Designer (the attack portion of it was released free, that's what I use). A lot of transient designers, like dominion, work well in increasing the attack, but SPL also brightens the attack, while leaving the decay portion unEQ'd. This means that once it comes to clipping and limiting and otherwise murdering your snare, the attack still pokes out a little more because it's brighter, rather than the snare as a whole becoming unnaturally harsh.
