My understanding is that in a well designed tube system (probably a high voltage one with a chunky enough power supply - but I'm not expert here) the transient response would be more than adequate if not better that some solid state equivalents.

In fact it would probably have just a worse noise floor than an op-amp based one and prettier harmonic distortion.

The reaction time of the compressor is more to do with the feedback gain control type circuitry which in some compressors is optical (slow) and in some is electronic (faster).

Why you'd necessarily want one with a really snappy attack to process snappy drum sounds I'm not sure unless you want to nuke the transients completely ... I can get our TLA to affect sounds faster than you are describing.

The problem I had with the TLA was that it was just plain boring. There is nothing about it's sound that makes me want to use it more than say the waves compressors.

The Urei and JoeMeek stuff are much more interesting and get used often.

The Ureis don't have a massively fast attack time either, the ones I'm using actually don't have attack or release controls I just leave them set to 20:1 ratio and wind up the gain from the computer or turn it down depending on how much compression I want.

Never used the triple Cs ... they are digital right? any better than say C4?