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.

I love all of the little tricks they employ! The two pole filter on the Rat was really eye opening to me; it makes perfect sense once you sit down and think through it, and the implementation is very elegant in its simplicity.

One of my favorites in this genre are using CMOS inverters as inverting op amps with a very pleasing and smooth distortion sound.