Saturation is all the rage now. It seems to be the current trend, and a quality that is often rightly or wrongly associated with authenticity and analog realism. 

Saturation plugins have become increasingly more important in the era of in the box mixing with plugins, and the decreasing viability of working on and owning the large frame recording consoles of not too distant past. 

I believe that many of the positive qualities and subtlties of saturation are often missed by using it at its extremes. 

Some saturation and tape, tube emulations, transformer and circuit modedled pre-amp plugins do a great job of recreating the subtle saturation that when added across many channels or signal chains, creates the elusive and vibrant depth and dimensional quality that many of us attribute to analog mixing and recording.