Cubase

I upgraded my Cubase to Cubase 12 almost a year ago. With it came a number of free goodies including Melodyne Essential.

Have never used Melodyne before, and since I've done the upgrade, I haven't actually done anything with vocals until recently.

So I decided to try Melodyne Essnetial out - My subjective feeling is that it sounds more natural than Cubase's own pitch correction tool. And it integrates quite well with Cubase itself. There are a couple of glaring drawbacks however:

1. Once an audio clip gets taken over by melodyne, I find it impossible to use any of the Audio Process anymore (e.g. gain, normalize, etc). So I learned it the hard way to do these prior to starting melodyne on the clip. Or is there a way of working around this?

2. This version of melodyne lacks the ability to do note flattening it seems.

So for those who also have melodyne essential, which do you prefer - cubase's own function, or melodyne?