bahum, thanks for letting me barge in on this one sir.
I actually started making music on trackers since around those days (which is ancient times) there was nothing really much else to make music on if you only had a pc and no synths, samplers and fx units (hardware!) since you were a kid and couldn't barely afford a pack of fags. And like kama said, when vst's came knocking around 10 years ago, most people who used trackers stepped over to fruity, cubase, reason etc. since these handled vst's and the only tracker that did eventually was modplug tracker and pretty shakey like kama also stated. i thought it sucked because I, for myself, am a 100% sure that making beats in a tracker gives more detail and innovation to them than in audiolanes or piano rolls. flame me down, but I tried it all and nothing can convince me otherwise.
anyway, since then trackers SEEMED to have been an oldskool thing, but since the steady rise of Renoise, the last couple of years tracking is going through a massive revival. The Renoise community is growing massively and many professional artists use it with the same results in quality as any professional daw. me myself don't use renoise but a VSTi plugin called Revisit, which is cool imo since you can combine it with your own daw of choice and can choose whether to sequence horizontally or vertically. for example, some things like melodic stuff I can still do in the piano roll in the host, but other things like beatmaking I do in Revisit which is seamlessly synced with my host, that can trigger it's patterns by MIDI.
I put up a post about Revisit in the 'Cheap / Free alternatives to commonly warezed programs' sticky on the top of this forum if you want to check it out.