Just in case someone missed it: there is a workaround for previewing samples in any pitch from any offset:
https://forum.renoise.com/t/play-samples-from-any-position-in-any-pitch/46801
It’s not necessarily a replacement for what saine is looking for (because, well what if you are actually using phrases?) - but infinitely better than nothing.
While this doesn’t help in my case ( = whole point being, how fast it is to just bang away with mouseclick+enter - never having to prepare or ‘enable’ anything beforehand, or drag any markers around. When it comes to the rather tedious process of looking for samples and snippets from hours and hours of material, which get-dragged-and-get-deleted from the project in a machinegun-like manner, and wanting to check the clips at different pitches throughout, a low threshold workflow is everything - and this is what the old Renoise version excels at, even taking into account the super fast loading time of the DAW itself - it’s bliss) - this is still a fantastic tip for many different purposes. And of course, for many other purposes, even way better, as it can achieve more than the functionality discussed here.
Also the phrasemate tool -tip at the end of your post is great, thanks for sharing that.