Hey,
regarding other daw’s common concepts and a good handling, wouldn’t it be the best if one sample could consist of a bunch of slices that can be quantized, so that the whole sample would play with only one note? Something like the rex file format (that btw. works out-of-the-box without any quantization), were you can play the sample in different speeds without pitching thanks to intelligent volume transitions between the slices.
The current way in Renoise by splitting a sample into lot of pieces and then manually sequence it, is a bit complicated approach and for live recording also not needed, since most people won’t sequence an amen break out of each recording.
The best maybe would be a combination of both, so you could play the whole sliced and quantized sample using one note.
The phrases section could be utilized for this… If the sampler was capable of tracking down each slice into a phrase with exact micro timing and this phrase was also reflected in the sample editor, so you could move around the slices easily there.
Thanks for your attention.