Articulation is everything! Distortion is compression, and simple things like the I-V curves of a clipping diode or slew limiting from a crappier op amp make a huge difference in the "feel" of distortion, especially with guitar. I love how Boss pedals in the 80s started using a fairly simple discrete op amp design to have greater control over this, as well as stacking on more and more active filtering stages for pre and post emphasis on the distortion.

Designing dirt pedals for guitar is a very humbling exercise in that many seemingly innocuous decisions can have large impacts on the end result. Often times you're bucking what would normally be EE best-practices and exploiting the edges of behavior in components to coax out pleasing nonlinearities. Equal parts engineering and what can feel like sorcery (but usually has a reasonable explanation).

My designs never left the breadboard, but indeed it was truly humbling to learn how these components actually behave in the wild. College level models don't do them justice.

I'll never forget a friend showing me a Japanese made DS-1 from 1983, which had all those pleasant artifacts stemming from the circuits non-ideal performance. Newer ones sound really harsh in comparison.

The DS-1 is itself surprisingly complex. I'm particularly a fan of the little hidden RC circuit in the clipping stage(here spanning from R14 to C10):

https://www.electrosmash.com/boss-ds1-analysis#layout

As said in section 6.3, its effect is only significant below the diodes' forward voltage. I exchanged one diode in my unit with a yellow LED (a diode is a diode, all in all) and it was particularly audible. Initially I thought it's the LEDs junction capacitance, but that measures in tens of picofarads - not nearly enough to register.