I think its best to learn good panning, before playing around with stereo imagers myself, they can be very useful, but until you get a good grasp of the stereo soundscape, you can just as easily mangle the mix
if you program your own drums, simply pushing hihats, rides, tambs, etc off by ~5% in each direction left/right, while your kick and snare are in the middle, can really bring allot of life to drums - and then have the occasional hit further out, ~20% or so, strategically placed in the phrase, can open the mix up beautifully