I’ll preface this by saying you definitely have a right to your opinion and like Darenager said, if you ain’t feeling it, sell it and don’t look back.
Now having said that…The TR8S doesn’t have the Elektron sequencer. And, to me, a drum machine without the Elektron sequencer is questionable for my circumstances. I can make a pattern that loops once every eight bars with conditional trigs and only be looking at one page, which is a huge workflow bonus for me. I really don’t like scrolling through multiple pages just to put an open hat or a kick in a different spot. But I can put a conditional trig on the crash cymbal so it happens every eight bars, and conditional trigs on random toms and snares so that I get a fill every four bars. Suddenly my one page of information becomes a lot more interesting and I have a lot less headache to deal with. Speaking of fills, I haven’t even taken advantage of fill mode, although I really should start.
And that’s just talking about conditional trigs. Nevermind the parameter locking and whatever else. I don’t think TR8S has anything like that, but I’d have to check. I had a TR8 and it certainly didn’t.
The different modes are very helpful, too. I like mute mode and the fact that you can easily solo tracks. You can probably do that on TR8S though, again I’m not sure.
People say the synthesis is limited, and while that might be true, I think the same can be said for any modern drum machine. We’re lucky that the TR8S has 808 and 909 synthesis (and 606 and 707? correct me if I’m wrong), but that’s still fairly “limited.” It has samples, but so does the Rytm. I used to not like the Rytm hats, but they’ve grown on me more and i’m able to coax better sounds out of them. The engine is “limited”, but it’s also deep within its limitations. It has a ton of sweet spots, and just going through the onboard preset kit sounds shows this.
The machine gets deeper as you get more familiar with it. I can’t believe I had the thing for almost a year before I realized I can tweak all of the sounds as much as I want and just reload the kit back to a saved state. Same with a pattern. I can add in all sorts of trigs to the pattern and if I ever want to go back to init I just reload it. This has given me a lot of freedom in performing this unit with my band.
Though I agree most onboard FX are just okay (reverb doesn’t get big or loud enough for my taste, and I’ve never been too fond of having one FX and sending. I always prefer sounds to have their individual FX. delay is also fine), the analog distortion and compression are really good.
Having said all this, if I paid $1500 for the mkII, I’d probably feel similar to you OP. But instead I bought a MkI from a user here on this forum for about $850 and I’m very happy with the purchase. I don’t even know what other drum machine I could possibly get that would make me happier for around the same price.