I'm not sure what you mean by stock EQ. I use the per track EQ quite often. I find that most of the time I'm just using it as a High Pass or Low Pass. I tend to leave things alone when tracking but for instance...I happen to know that the snare on our studio set has an odd high frequency harmonic...if we move the snare out to the middle of the room, the harmonic isn't there....so, anyways. I use a sharp high frequency/low pass curve for the drums and to keep some of the bubble butt rumble out, I also throw in a low freq/high pass on the kick drum.
I find it to be quite useable.