I think you may have misunderstood what gain staging is.
In a nutshell, gain staging is the act of setting appropriate levels from the very start of the chain (be it vst instrument or mic to pre-amp) going into the next stage, from that stage to the next all the way to the summing of the signal at the channel fader, so that you've got headroom before clipping and a good noise to signal ratio. Even in the plugin world this makes some sense because working at extreme levels may not sound as good as working at a sensible level would, even though daws today offer a massive amount of internal headroom.
Gain staging doesn't mean that you start balancing the mix, because then you already started mixing. What I think, is if you gain staged properly from the start, with all your faders at unity gain then no individual channel or plugin should be running too hot, and they should essentially be at a pretty much even so nothing is too loud or too quiet, and everything roughly at the same level.
From that point you can start balancing your mix using only the faders because you've already set the foundation.
I honestly think that balancing the mix is crucial (after all its not a coincidence that channel faders and panning is always readily available in every mix console, analog or virtual) but after EQing and other processing you will most likely want to go back and re balance it again anyway, do don't sweat it, just go ahead and eq.
