Yeah, I always found them to need a lot of care and attention... They get lost in a mix so easily... I've even found myself double tracking them sometimes to make them louder and panning both tracks dead center... And compressing the fuck out of them...

Here's a great trick to get a good release on the compressor for kicks and bass guitars... If you take 60,000 and divide it by the number of beats per minute in your song, then keep dividing the result by two until you get a number between 50 and 100, you get a perfect tempo based pumping in your mix... then slowly turn up the attack until you get the desired envelope to your beats and basslines...

A compressor like the one that ships with the Waves bundle is good (the Waves C1 Compressor), since it shows you graphically how much your sound is being attenuated by so you don't end up overcompressing...