Low-volume cymbals are underrated

This is my first attempt to write anything for LessWrong, so I'm going to start with something where I feel reasonably comfortable speaking from direct experience. I'm a drummer for a comedy nu-metal band that often finds itself booked for venues that are unprepared for hosting a nu-metal band. For the purpose of smoothing out these gigs, I have started using low-volume cymbals. Drummers tend to dislike low-volume cymbals, feeling they sound "thin" compared to real cymbals. When I looked around online for the conventional wisdom, I saw a number of people expressing the opinion that it's better to learn to play quietly rather than use low-volume cymbals at shows. Many expressed the view that low-volume cymbals are good for practicing, but inappropriate for performances. In my experience, this is wrong and has maybe been unhelpfully moralized. Playing quietly is hard, so it's easy to criticize people for not wanting to practice it. But earlier in my life, I was a jazz drummer who played many gigs requiring controlled volume levels. This is appropriate for jazz, but inappropriate for most rock music, and definitely inappropriate for nu-metal. Low-volume cymbals are a better, more practical solution. Rock is an amplified genre. This means that rock is loud by default if you're in the room where rock music is happening. But people tend to complain that the drums are too loud. They are colloquially correct, but technically incorrect. What's actually too loud are the cymbals. At nearly every rock show, everything else has to be amplified up to balance with the natural loudness of the cymbals. Any drum you want to actually hear generally needs to be amplified in a rock setting (except the metallic snare wires, which cut through more like cymbals than a drum). This still doesn't address the suggestion to play quieter. But in my experience this doesn't really work. Good rock drummers already know to play with a softer touch on the cymbals than on the drums. This isn't really