Sometimes the way to go is rather than (as we often tend to do) try to make something work the way we want, instead try to work the way the thing works.
An example of this in this case might be to use a whole bank for variations of sections of a piece, so initially forget about parts, start working on your first pattern, copy it to another pattern and change the sequencing a bit, rinse and repeat until you filled a whole bank. Now listen back to your patterns and if you decide that some of them need different sounds copy the part and make the changes, so that eventually (which can happen quite quickly, working this way) you have 16 patterns with 4 sets (parts) of sounds. You have plenty of other banks which can all have their own set of patterns and parts.
So in effect rather than squeezing a lot of different pieces into one bank, the bank is used just for one piece but with multiple variations, this way you get to use parts in a more logical way, and your patterns are used more in a jamming/composition way than perhaps they would be with for example the Digitakt, where typically you’d tend to use fewer patterns for the same piece and more likely focus on muting and tweaking to ‘ring the changes’.
It was actually the Toraiz SP16 which made me think of the Octatrack in this way, because the SP16 only has 16 samples across 16 tracks across 16 patterns, but like the Octatrack there are no shortage of pattern banks each with their own sample set, so it becomes a focus on using more patterns with sequencing variations.
Of course on the Octatrack we have scenes which can be used to further enhance this, not to mention using statics say in one part to contain samples of other pieces in other banks to use for transitions and so on.
As others have said parts can at first feel a bit of a ball ache, but ultimately they can be used in many ways, making them actually more powerful than kits.
