Vocal pitch tracking best practices

I've been asked to create a Max patch/device that controls a mono synth according to vocal input. The development is moving along, but I figured I'd ask around to see if ay users have any valuable advice on as to getting the pitch tracking to be awesome.

I've got a basic signal flow concept of input -> gate -> Eq -> Compression -> Pitch tracking. Does this seem about right? Im curious as to the difference if I put the Compression before the EQ. I just figured I'd only want to compress the data that I will actually be using (frequencies within the range of the human voice).

I've implemented it with retune~, but I am also thinking about investigating fzero~. My experiments with retune have been encouraging, but it's hard to accurately track the octave of the fundamental due to the complexity of the voice. On a synth it works incredibly well. I've had trouble getting a stable reliable pitch and 'note' events from fzero~. It seems to want to spit output data constantly, including the onset indication. I was thinking of cooking something up in Gen to tame the data and get it solid.

Any advice, anecdotes, or warnings would be greatly appreciated.