Hey RG, well limiters have their uses but I wouldn't use one on guitar, although if you need to limit the input to the next device so you don't blow it out you could use one (bad gain structure though
). We used to (and I'm sure they still do) use a peak limiters on the pa output so we didn't blow speakers (well I didn't, it's an excuse (in some ways) for not so great gain structure etc), but often used to make sure the guys mixing other bands don't blow your speakers, and as I like to run some headroom in the power amps.... they could do it.
So a peak limiter or limiter is just a compressor with a very high ratio, I personally call 8:1 compression peak limiting, but limiters are generally much higher ratios than that (extreme 100:1) (so for every 100 units of gain change, squish it to 1). With a limiter you adjust the threshold at the spot you want to limit at. To do more normal compression, you adjust the threshold lower to include all the signal you want to squish.
I use a little compression on my MP2 clean sounds, for much the same reason you do, spongy/liquid and take some of the bight off, and the attack transients in these preamps are out there... they have so much gain, and when it's clean.. I don't use it on distorted tones, but then they are being tamed a bit by the tubes (not strictly compression but very similar effect).