I was thinking the exact same thing over the weekend while catching up on those two threads.
I use distortion a lot, often subtly and on almost everything, but the one thing that has generally eluded me is the distortion best for all/most purposes. The closest all-rounder I use is in software, Audio Damage’s Kombinat, which is like religion to me, always the first plugin added to a project, often used as dirty 3-band EQ.
The past year, I’ve been mostly neglecting synths in favour of guitar. My current inclination is stacking drives or boosts. What I have set up at the moment is the Hudson Broadcast, a germanium pre-amp modelled on an old console input, running into a VintageFX Colordrive, a Colorsound Power Boost clone. Neither distorts heavily on its own and both have lots of gain. Stacked, they give a fairly wide dynamic range from sparkly clean to a rough, rattling, distempered sound. And then some light amp distortion.
For overdrives, my main two are the Snouse Blackbox, a Bluesbreaker variation, and a Hamstead Odyssey, which is its own thing, an option-heavy clean to hard distortion. The Odyssey and the Broadcast have worked great with synths, usually run as a send of a mixer channel so that I can manage input carefully. The Broadcast is really the closest thing in a pedal I’ve found that makes everything sound just a little better, no matter where it is in the signal chain.
I have a lot of fuzz pedals that I mostly use as special cases, haven’t really found one that was essential to me. My current favourite for guitar is the SolidGoldFx Sasori, it does that mid-60s go-go dance fuzz well, which is I think where my head is at for fuzz lately.