With me, I started with analog and moved into digital. With tape, I only had a 4 track, so when I moved into digital, I had all of these virtual tracks in the DAW and I also have 10 actual hard wired tracks to record to. I was in track heaven. And that was my problem. I thought to myself, "wow, no tape his, no generation degradation, and I simply wanted it all. I finally felt like I had a pro studio.
Of course that was all just my own ego talking, as it was far from pro...even semi pro. But, sometimes you have to go to the extreme before you can overdose and then recover. I had tracks all over the damn place, with drums, guitars, strings and vocals, and while they all sounded nice and clean, they also seemed pretty damn flat and stark. I wanted to turn the strings up, but to do that, I stepped on some of the drums. I wanted to hear the background vocals, and then the cymbals and hi hat suffered.
I finally figured out what my problem was. I had overdosed on tracks. I had told myself that because it was all digital, it was all good. But, what I failed to understand was there is still a threshold to the final result. You always have that zero dB to deal with and while you can stuff all kinds of tracks in there, the result is often just a flat mass of sound that has no depth and distinction.
Even panning to stereo, to give me more width didn't really help. Oh, it helped some, but I was so far into the multi-track world that I just added more tracks. I tried plugins that were designed to give you more headroom and I read essays about how to use the VU meter to your advantage, yadda, yadda, yadda. I learned a lot, but I was going at it all wrong.
What I finally figured out was, along with mic placement and using the room as part of your natural ambience, less is more. It just boiled down to me trying to stuff too much into my mixes. I have all of these digital VSTs and man, I can sound like a full orchestra, now. So, on top of the drums that each have their own track, and the guitars that were done in the second wave, I was stuffing brass and woodwinds and strings in like I was the new Phil Spector, minus the weird wigs and sunglasses.
Less is really a lot more, when you think about it. You have more depth in your tracks, because everything that is there can kind of spread out. You can hear everything and everything kind of has it's own place. I still use my stereo to place things on right and left, but I've really started limiting all of my strings and other orchestral tracks to being more tastefully placed, here and there.
And when you listen to bands like the Beatles, for instance...they were limited to a 4 track machine and they bounced things around quite a bit. But, in their songs, you hear strings here and there, and then maybe trumpet or two over there while the vocal is on top, with maybe an acoustic guitar or piano. And when a full string section would take over, nothing else was there. All guitars were gone, and only the vocal and drums. There wasn't enough band width for it all. The songs were never over mixed. They subscribed to the notion that "less is more".
"Less is more" has a deeper meaning, too. You can have a lot of vocals, three and four part harmony and that wall of sound that Spector was so famous for, but if you really want to catch someone's ear, don't put all of that stuff in every song. Leave some of the harmony out, so the listener can maybe sing along. Or maybe just to keep the band width open for what's there, for the purpose of depth and presence in the mix.
There's another saying that works here, too. KISS, which means "keep it simple, stupid". Don't try to be the master of tracking, just because you have all of those options in front of you. Sure, in a live gig, they say leave it on the stage. But that's talking about the performance. They also tell you to leave them wanting more. If you give them everything you've got all at once, what else are they going to want from you? And what else do you have?
"Less is more" and "Keep it simple, stupid". These are things I learned, when I moved from analog to digital. Maybe this is something the OP has been experiencing, too?