Can you explain the merits of the MPC? Is it just that it offers a more hands-on feel, or is there more to it than that?
The things I love about it...
Your drum sequences are in the same place as your drum samples. So you don't lose beats through samples getting lost, paths getting corrupted etc.
The operating system is 20 years old, and every bug, inconsistency and niggle has been ironed out. It is the most intuitive machine I have ever used.
But the main one is that it forces you to compose with your ears, not your eyes.
The beatmaking process basically goes like this: you start the sequencer running and get a metronome output. You hit pads with different sounds assigned to them, and the sequencer grabs the hits and quantises them. If you listen back to it and don't like what you did, you can scrub it off
without stopping the sequencer by holding Delete down with the pad you hit to input the sound originally. What this means in practice is that the loop goes round and round, and you chuck different stuff in and out, seeing what works. It the most natural way to make beats I've ever come across.
There's other stuff like the rock-solid timing and the songlist function, which I use to structure tracks, but the main one is just the pleasure of using it. The only thing it can't do well is audio editing, but the newer ones have USB anyway so you can edit and catalogue samples on the PC.
MPCs are legendary.
Everyone should try one. Get it 2nd hand, then you lose nothing if you do decide to sell it on.