pjrake,
RE: "i know money shouldn't be an indicator of quality (well, maybe yes, i guess! lol) but the TS9 is $99 and the 808 is $139 and the OCD is $143.10. is that telling me anything?". No. In this case, the quality is sufficient that tonal preference is what matters.
RE: "...wanted to know if the maxon OD-808 or the fulltone OCD would be a great improvement over the ibanez TS9.". All depends on what you would consider an improvement. The baseline is the OD-808. The classic Tubescreamer. It cuts some of your bass, so it often gets credited with "tightening" your bass. It also has a noticeable upper-mid boost (around 1.6-3.2kHz), so it can help you cut through the mix a little and give some harmonic content back to your solos.
The TS-9 is a variation of the OD-808 that has a slightly tamer treble response, similar bass response, and about the same amount of mid boost, only the frequency center is lowered a bit (800Hz - 1.6kHz). In that respect, both pedals are quite similar and it comes down to a preference on mid boost.
The OCD is a much flatter frequency response unit. That means it has more bass overall, and the mids aren't especially boosted or cut. In that sense, it keeps your original guitar signal fairly intact. However, it does add a distinctive overdrive/distortion/gain sound to it, much more gain than the OD-808 or the TS-9, and will color your sound in that way, although users almost unanimously applaud the quality of that coloring. Used by itself through a clean amp channel, the OCD can sound much like a cranked Marshall if its gain knob is set high. In front of a Recto, with the gain knob rolled back quite a bit, it provides a combined sound that is just about as good as it gets. You get the tasty mid-range and harmonic response that the Recto is missing, but you don't get the harsher, more raspy midrange boost that the Tubescreamer gets criticized for, and you keep all of the big bass response that you want.
For me personally, I prefer the sound of the OCD, though I also own a Keeley-modified SD-1 which is very much in the mold of the Tubescreamer, as well as several personally-modified Tubescreamer types. Actually, I wanted to tweak the sound of the OCD just slightly to my own tastes, so I built my own from scratch to my own specifications. Hi, I'm Chris, and I'm a tweakaholic. :mrgreen:
