You could explore the euclidian sequencer and routing of various parameters and effects to LFO destinations. Random LFO can give interesting results when the depth being modulated.
Selective control all gives you the ability to choose which tracks are impacted by the control all feature and to then modulate multiple tracks at once and afterwards quickly return them back to their original state by reloading the pattern.
While in the modified state if you like what you hear from your tweaking, you can copy the entire pattern with the modulation tweaks in place and copy that to a different, empty pattern slot without changing to it, so that you can revisit that same heavily effected pattern state later without having to perform the exact same tweaks.
You can use the arpeggiator in creative ways by modifying the parameters as it plays and by locking trigs with different levels of parameters (effects or ratios, whatever) then you can get a lot of variation out of a track. Also using the arpeggiator you can sort of fake a polyrhythm.
If you fully utilize trig conditions you can set a neighbor track to only play when a certain sound on the other track plays, or you can use the pre / not pre trig condition to make it so a trig only plays (or doesn’t play) when the one before it has gone off if the condition is evaluated as true.
While less philosophical, the reality is that you have to stretch your own creativity over your understanding of the machine, otherwise you may as well just read the digitone 2 tips and tricks thread to try and get your own best workflow out of it by absorbing tricks shared by other users.
It’s true, it doesn’t have the sp404mkII performance mode features because digitone is not a sampler or very similar at all to the sp404, it’s unique from that and generally the elektron workflow will not mirror the roland paradigm. Elektron workflow, in my opinion, relies on the user’s ability to operate the machine which is not so different from what you or I were saying previously, however there is no trickery involved, just making best use of the available facilities to express what you hear.
I really can’t tell you every single thing digitone 2 can do, I still use a digitone 1, but if I can think of these things without owning it or only referencing information about a similar but less capable device, I think you understand that it’s not philosophy which reads the manual or takes a stab at experimenting, it’s the user.
I think you have a good base for learning because of your prior experience but that you’ll have to do some experimentation to find your own workflow for this, because there is no performance mode with tricks to supplement that, however there are a wealth of features which produce interesting results when set to extremes or not even extremes but just modified with purpose.
I don’t know if this is at all helpful but hopefully it’s enough to get you started and good luck.