Here's my thoughts on it after owning for a while now.
It takes effort to learn how to use it. Everyone's ear is different and everyone's ancillary gear is different. This thing is a monster of details and sounds. Stomp boxes do things one way and they do what they do, but the helix is like a simulation of an entire guitar shop with all of the gear at your disposal. All of what it can do inside of routing, eqing, leveling, etc, etc, etc will not be "plug and play"
Start with the user banks and blank templates. Work backwards in the chain. get your existing clean signal tweaked before adding any effects, reverbs, or other dynamics. If you want... go to the sound library and factory banks and find a tone in there that you like alot. Look at how its routed, look at how it's built and mimic it. Re-create that tone manually so you get used to what every part of the signal chains do. I have to tweak every patch I download because it was made by someone with different monitors, different cabs, and different guitars than I own.
Moral of the story is, you get out of helix what you put into it. You need to put alot in initially to get great tone. If you do, though, you can make what I call master patches. One preset, an entire album of your favorite artist. Snapshots, snapshots, snapshots. It's like having presets within presets that can flip around all of the settings and parameters of everything in your preset patch. I saw one for Pink Floyd that pretty much nails every song on Dark Side and The Wall in a single preset, a dozen snapshots and stompbox mode settings. It's using tons of blocks. It's epic and customizable. That's the kind of things you can build.
This thing is a beast in the studio but it's advanced way of handling routing, presets, and snapshots lends itself very well to live performances. You can layout multiple presets for your gig, all with different groups of effects. Or, and what I prefer to do, is lay out a single preset as an entire pedalchain then use snapshots to switch between the parts of the songs I'm playing.
cooler still is the easy midi integration and commanding. I can trigger other instruments in my daw with my footswitches. Mix it with NI maschine and you can trigger different scenes in the song with a tap of your foot. It becomes a one-man-band sort of experience that few other devices can do effectively.
Good luck with whatever you ended up doing, or are still trying to figure out if you want to do.
