Yes, it is often than simple.
I'm just throwing this in here for the sake of jumbling your thoughts and giving you a different perspective, not to provide rigid guidelines. But I like to think that faders are a way to ALLOT volume and clarity, not to freely give it out. For example, you turned up the kick in the mix, but to the listener, that is the same thing as turning everything else down. Nothing can be loud or louder without something else being quiet or quieter. Otherwise we are just hearing a single sound in isolation. Even then, we hear which parts of that sound are louder than others. Unless you automate something partway through the song, your listener isn't going to know the difference between turning your kick up and turning everything else down. So because of that, volume is actually a limited resource, and you decide the pecking order every time you move the fader.
And for clarity, it's a similar thing. We hear a sound with the most clarity in isolation. Makes sense. Why would it be easier to hear what a kick sample TRULY sounds like with other sounds playing around it? It will always be easier when soloing the instrument. But that's not a bad thing at all. Just like, in the paragraph above, something being quiet isn't a problem. It's a necessary part of music. Often times, we don't WANT to hear a sound with as much clarity as possible. We don't pick sounds based on how good they are by themselves, we pick them for the context. Which means we often DON'T want to hear what they really sound like. A great example is a really lame thump for a kick that seems to have serious punch in the mix. So, with our faders, we turn stuff down (which is, again, like turning everything else up), and we decide how much of a sound we really want to hear. The only time adding more stuff into a song ADDS clarity is in a psychoacoustic way. A bass triggering under a kick in a mid heavy song will give us something in the low end to grab onto everytime the kick hits. While we notice the kick, we aren't hearing what it really sounds like. We are hearing what it sounds like when it hits with a bass. Or distorting a sound to add harmonic content to grab onto (though a lot of times people don't adjust their output volume on distortion units, so they are really just making the thing louder. In which case, they might just want to turn the sound up). Or a favorite of mine is when a specific sound is loud, and once a bunch of other elements come in, we automate its volume down. We've already heard the sound pretty loud, and even though we turned it down for the fuller mix, our brains are filling in the blanks of the missing volume.