My favourite always starts on a specific preset, but the actual operation needs to be done playing the track, or while tracking if you're one of the people who do that (I don't). Sometimes even having a break, then going back to a track means you don't like what you selected. For me, it's purely down to the ears.
For years when I was first doing this I liked uncompressed everything, then a bit of bass and vox compression crept in, and now I can detect compression much easier. When teaching in college, very few students could hear compression, until their ears got trained to be more discriminate. You have to learn how it sounds, and what to tweak if you don't like the result.