excellent article - I will use it in my defense when I get taken to task for buying a mic pre I've had my eye on for a long time, but thought would be redundant because I have mic pres in my interface.
but seriously, it did validate something I had been thinking about, because I do a metric poop-ton of DI recording due to not being able to play out loud because of changes in the living situation at my household. It also makes a lot of sense to shape the characteristic of the sound before it hits the, for lack of a charitable term, less than audiophile quality of converters in my entry level interface. By the time I get any decent level out of the interface, breathing on the low E string tends to cause the dreaded 'red light' crackle to come on.
as long as we're putting hardware in front of the interface, what about putting a compressor in line as well to further help keep the interface's preamp and converter from crapping out? Maybe an article idea for the future?