I emailed Jake, and no, he had nothing to do with the song. I'd copy the email, but I'm on my phone and I gotta go get painful surgery in a few minutes, so it'll have to wait.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. A lot of people just think of mastering as "smash the crap out of the track".
Which, sadly, for the case of many "re-mastered" albums, is more or less what they did.
I generally try to shoot for an RMS or dynamic range level when limiting. TT dynamic range meter is a good tool for this purpose.
As for master bus compressors, I never use em. But people who do generally say you just want to be tickling the gain reduction. You'll want to mix into a bus compressor from the start, putting it on at the end kinda defeats the purpose.
I don't have the modder's genes myself, but I'd happily pay someone to make me one. Something tells me it might be more comfortable than an actual N64 controller.
You guys must not be able to read. He's looking for something free. Not sure what you're going to find for free that's on par with Sylenth1 or Massive.