Compressing, limiting and downright breaking

I feel like starting with one of my favourite rants.  Everyone who does any music recording should know about the compressor/limiter, that useful bit of kit which essentially reduces the music's dynamic range thus preventing your bassist sounding like he has set off a land-mine under the e-string during a quite passage.  It works by having a threshold level below which the input to output ratio is 1:1 and above which the ratio can be set between 1:1 and infinity:1 hence producing a reduction in gain.  A limiter is a compressor with the ratio set at infinity:1 and can be used to boost the overall volume of a track.  The limiter sets all output above the threshold to a constant level and allows you to increase the gain up to the point of clipping.  However in the idiotic pursuit of louder and louder tracks many people (professional and amateur) push the gain too far and get horrible digital clipping.  In ye olde days of analogue recording a bit of clipping was fine - it just added some warm fuzziness - but digital clipping is bad, very very bad!  Do the sound engineers think we can't hear it above a distorted guitar?  Do they think we only listen to music through £5.99 headphones? Grrr!