vsti rules all, sample is “has been”
There are some things that samples can do, that few VSTi can. I personally keep a nice oversampled set of waveforms for those clinically pure chip type sounds that can rumble or screech.
With a good quality multisampled saw wave and the built in LFO and 12dB filtering in renoise and distortion you can do some fairly decent acid 303-like patterns without killing your cpu with the overhead of a “real” 303-emulating softsynth. For those 303-like acid slides, tone portamento with twice the speed required to glide in a row works nicely too. Of course, i often find myself using a VST distortion to avoid the aliasing and sample rate dependence of the rather simplistic built-in distortion in renoise. Then again if you want to sound like Rebirth or something, aliasing in the distortion is just fine.
A lot of the time i complement my sample usage with higher quality VST effects… sometimes rendering it all into renoise to save CPU. Many softsynths out there sound crap without their built-in effects anyway, so primitive samples + good effects can go a long way.
“so primitive samples + good effects can go a long way”
word!
& cheap (synthedit?) vsti + quality warez = banging synths 
an obvious point which has been hinted at, but im confused that it’s not more prominent, is that people are arguing whether one way is better but it completely depends on what kind of sound you’re trying to achieve. No amount of processing or slick vst drums will give you that cut straight from vinyl sound, or a rocking live banging drum kit. no vsti will ever sound as good as a skilled guitar player playing the guitar. no vsti will ever create vocals that the uniqueness and human warmth an actual voicebox/diaphragm could. im going to go out on a limb and say that unless youre making synthetic music, sampling is most likely your most stable pillar.
I was doing something similar today:
Try it:
Get two sawteeth single cycle waves, one up, one down, play them both at the same volume and pitch in the same channel but detune one of them slightly. The result - chiptune style PWM! 
Sounds like YOU are going to make the next beatbattle sample pack 
I think the next beatbattle sample pack should only have basic synth waveforms like saw, noise, pulse, triangle and sine. Let people show off just what can be done with renoise given good-quality basic synthesizer building blocks.
Totally agree.
Sine
Saw +
Saw -
Square
Triangle
White Noise Burst
Screw good quality… give me some 8bit horrible quality waves… who cares if your bass kicks sound dirty… as long as you know how to make em crunch 
Why giving you eight when two or four bit do just good as well?
since this question is “on the renoise forum” i answer samples, because you have much more control over samples in renoise than you do vsti’s.
now for instance if we could do the same things with vstI’s as we can with samples then fvckYA! vsti would be the choice!
i dont think this will happen until a “new proper format” is decided upon & adhered to by developers of plugins, vsti from what i see is an F’N MESS!!
on top of it, the licesensing is retarded too! im not a lawyer but from what i see its closed and backward. nothing like forward thinking.