Change and repetition, man, you've got to have a bit of the familiar along with the zomg groundbreaking shit. If you want to make an old skool amen tearout tune, there's a certain sound you're going for and I think you should limit yourself from going to great lengths making your own particular version of a break, when the end result is going to be pretty much the same anyways.
I usually get into layering a whole lot of breaks and one shots and processing and bouncing them around, but I do enjoy sample based music, and sometimes it's cool to see what you can get out of rearranging stuff that people've made before, snatching samples from different sources and making them all sound like they belong together.