^^I completely agree... I've found that a house curve is a good starting point - just to have something as a baseline that you can tune towards - but like you, I was never happy with any of the common house-curves - they just flat out didn't sound right to me. I spent a lot of time customizing a house curve to my preferences, just to allow me to get a lot closer to my "end result", but even then, I still make tweaks to it afterwards.
I gave up worrying if it "looks" correct and now just concentrate on making it *sound* correct - at least to *me*. :-)