It actually is an alien concept for me. I happened to work in a record studio a little bit and we used a ton of mics on drums, which is why they needed so many tracks, they needed ton of work, editing, cutting, noise filtering and buss compressing.
A lot of mics on drums is what most people are used to but some audio engineers can record amazing drums with just 2 really good mics and preamps. I am not one of them though.
I assume the reason why recording engineers want separate tracks is because they are not familiar with OT because almost everything they are going to do in a DAW to those drum tracks can be done internally in OT. A lot of drum mixing is applying EQ, compression, reverb and effects as well as adjusting gain and all of it can be done directly in OT.
Maybe you don’t need a drum synth but you are saying you need more audio outputs and you bought a device that clearly has only 2.
What you are saying now in regards to multiple outputs can all be done with Machinedrum UW+ (it has sample recording as well) or Analog Rytm which will have the Overbridge that you want, sample playback as well. And both of these machines will give you all the Elektron parameter locks and sequencing that you love.