I usually take it a step further and blend in samples with the strip-silenced toms. Makes everything so much easier, you just have to be careful with drum tuning and sample the toms at enough velocities.
I've had big bleed issues lately in some tom tracks and this trick really helped! As for the gates, I used to use triggers when recording to get the shitty yet sharp signal. Then shift a few ms earlier and put in the sidechain. Worked well even I had some mistrigging issues here and there. Sold my triggers since
