Not a dumb idea at all. The mastering engineer/producer Ian Shepherd (who runs the website and YT channel Production Advice) worked with a plugin company to develop a plugin called Perception, which now seems to be called Perception AB.
It's designed to allow you to bypass a plugin, plugin chain or even the whole mix it seems, whilst level-matching the before and after. I've never used it, I just remember him talking about it years ago when I used to follow his channel.
Of course, it's proprietary, non-Linux, not cheap (£105) and there doesn't seem to be a demo version to be able to test to see whether it would work with a bridge 
It would be cool to have a native and/or at least more wallet-friendly (i.e. gratis!) alternative 
Statistics: Posted by Quirq — Mon Nov 11, 2024 9:51 pm