I haven’t used Waves plugins myself since way back in 2009/2010 when making music with a friend of mine who used them.
I know they have a huge range of effect plugins, and I am considering getting some of them for mixing/mastering and group bus mixing.
Do you use Waves plugins yourself, which are your favorites, what do you like about them? 
I use a few Waves plugins, like Metafilter, CLA EchoSphere, Trueverb and Scheps Parallel Particles. And especially the last one is my favourite, because it creates for me an easy to use way of giving a boost and depth of some tracks in an arrangement. Just 4 dials to adjust “Air”, “Thick”, “Byte” and “Sub”; no learning curve needed, it’s a very intuitive plugin. Can be used for low and high frequency sounds.
I have a few Waves plugins and they are good. my favorite to use is the Abbey Roads j37 emulator, the original tape machine used at Abbey Roads Studio. i find that, while subtle, it gives my tracks a bit more of an authentic, “studio” recorded sound. Sill figuring all it’s settings, but I just add a tiny bit of compression behind it in the chain and it sound pretty good to my ears. Also have this one-knob mixing or saturation plugin, don’t remember as I think I’ve only used it once 
Thanks for sharing Hans, I have actually been looking mainly at the CLA range, because I really like Chris as a mixing engineer. His newest plugin looks really cool “Epic”, a combination of 4 delays and 4 reverbs in one single plugin.
But they have so many plugins that it’s easy to get lost just browsing their list haha.
Sure, Waves plugs are great. But everybody’s plugs are great! I can’t tell much difference between different companies’ plugs.
Authorization method matters, I guess.
The only company I’m super annoyed with is izotope.
And why am I annoyed with izoptope? Because not only are they ilok authorized (forgot my ilok? No plug!), but their new versions of ozone aren’t backward compatible with old, and old versions won’t run on newer OS. So…my old mastering sessions are obsoleted and can never be opened again. (They will open, but the old ozone settings are lost forever.) Badically, Ozone updates aren’t updates—they’re brand new plugins that replace your old, no longer usable, ozone.
I’ve had old clients ask me for updates or edits from 1 or 2 years ago, and I can’t do it for them. I have to re-master the song ground-up just to do a minor edit.
Never had that problem with Waves. I can open a 15-year-old session, and my Waves plugs, updated through the years, will open with all the settings intact.
You’re absolutely right…the collection of Waves plugins is immense, so it will be a hard way to navigate between all the different types before finding an interesting plugin. But…sometimes YouTube is a very useful friend to find out whether a plugin can be a nice one 
One little disadvantage regarding Waves plugins is that you can only get free updates for the plugin during a period of 1 year after purchase. After 1 year you have to purchase an update plan for 1 or more plugins, or decide to keep your latest version of the plugin. I’ve never seen this for plugins of other developers 
I use a LOT of waves plugins. Some are a waste of time but this list I can vouch for as I use them in nearly every track/composition as they’re incredible!!
The reneissance bundle -this is the best plugin bundle on waves website and it’s about ten years old… it has also had a big update and sounds incredible… extremely easy and intuitive to use too!
Andy sceps omni channel - my favourite mixing tool, it’s got so much packed into it, if you can only afford one waves plugin this is definitely the one I’d suggest for anyone looking to get waves stuff. So much packed into this and my favourite thing is it’s all knobs, there’s no visuals so if forces you to listen and make your own judgements, which is something that holds so many people back. 10/10
Multi Mod Rack - amazing distortion unit… it costs a fair amount to get all the distortions for this rack but man is it good. If allows your to add distortion to a specific frequency band. Hours of fun to. E had. Amazing sound but the downside is after buying everything to go with it you’ll have spent around £130. Worth it, but expensive for Waves imo.
Abbey roads saturator - this goes with the mod rack but it’s the only abbey roads plugin I have that I truly love. The others seem to just be jumping off the abbey roads name.
GW mix centric - brilliant plugin, it’s a one knob master, limiter that’s just works. Use it sparingly and it will turn your mixes into highly polished masters when used in conjunction with other plugins. (Disclaimer, this is the only GW plugin I endorse, the piano centric isn’t very goood… the voice centric is great but I’d rather not put verb or delay straight onto a vocal track so I don’t use it much for that reason.
Vocal and bass rider - you need to know how to use these, but used well they’ll save hours of editing for live recorded elements. A music gave of your doing that sort of work.
H series - really amazing analog series of delay, compressor, EQ and verb. No need to say any more about this bundle as all the pros swear by them (and the reneissance stuff).
Others I have but don’t use that much of are;
Abbey roads chambers - it’s good but cpu intensive.
Abbey roads mix room - id use it more if I really needed it, but I just don’t.
De-esser- it’s great but I use the reneissance one more as it works better.
There’s others but I can’t remember what I have since I have so many.
I’ve never seen this as a downside. Only one plugin I’ve ever updated and it was a bit pointless tbh. You still get the version you payed for, it’s just small tweaks to the plugins more than anything.
The only WAVE plugin I have and always use is the WLM Plus Loudness Meter which is quite useful finding the optimal loudness in terms of LUFS.
I have quickly gravitated towards waves after returning to music after 25 years off. Make sure you use the free StudioRack plugin. It will give you some real control over your waves plugins…
I’ve not used the rack. What sort of control are we talking here!?
I fully agree that the Waves update policy is really annoying. I will not be buying any further Waves plugins as they do cease to work after a few rounds of os updates etc. At least quite a few of the plugins that I have are now useless. The price to update them is really high in my opinion. The constant sales seem to be a way to lure people into their ecosystem and at some point start paying the high update prices.
I replaced the original posting, because my posting about second licenses was a misunderstanding. The second licenses are for use on a secondary computer. These secondary licenses expire after the update plan expires but one can continue to use the updated plugin versions of the main licenses. This was my bad.
I must give some credit to Waves. After purchasing the update plan, you seem to get a voucher for the same amount you paid for the update plan. The voucher can be used to purchase new plugins.
If you can grab Diamond when it’s on deep discount I think there is a bunch of useful stuff in there, I love all the Abby stuff I have and I own a bunch of the producers series, I find all of them useful from time to time.