This is why you were being made fun of...
In your original post, you inidcated that you did not have much money for hardware. You then indicated that you have "unlimited access to almost every piece of software on the market". You then indicated that you did not care how much the software costs.
This translates into "I needs to buy my hardware because this is hard to steal, and will steal the software because this is easy".
This hurts me in at least two ways:
1- The folks that write the software work hard for a long time to sell a relatively small amount of software (a lot more people buy office than ProTools). This means that every copy they don't sell (due to piracy) means that they will be be less able to produce new updates, and support their legitimate users.
In the end, the software is less good and more expensive.
2 - When the companies see that their software is being illegally copied, they need to beef up their copy protection. This has the doubly ill effect of distracting the programmers from making great music software, and the copy protection makes it a pain in the ass for legitimate owners to use the software.
There. Get it? Probably not.
To answer your question.
The best software is the TDM version of ProTools. It requires a high-end mac, and about $30k worth of Digi hardware to use.
The best compressors ARE hardware.
The best selection of free effects use the VST standard, and CuBasis (a VST host app) can be had inexpensively.
Pesonally I use
Cakewalk SONAR, Waves plugins, and a bunch of hardware, all of which I paid for.