Articulation is everything! Distortion is compression, and simple things like the I-V curves of a clipping diode or slew limiting from a crappier op amp make a huge difference in the "feel" of distortion, especially with guitar. I love how Boss pedals in the 80s started using a fairly simple discrete op amp design to have greater control over this, as well as stacking on more and more active filtering stages for pre and post emphasis on the distortion.

Designing dirt pedals for guitar is a very humbling exercise in that many seemingly innocuous decisions can have large impacts on the end result. Often times you're bucking what would normally be EE best-practices and exploiting the edges of behavior in components to coax out pleasing nonlinearities. Equal parts engineering and what can feel like sorcery (but usually has a reasonable explanation).