Well, as with everything in the digital audio world, there's no one "right" way to do anything!
That said, here's another option to consider. For a long time I've used both AIR Structure and AIR Transfuser (the full versions of both) for playing samples. Transfuser is great for creating loops, or creating creative processing of audio and a whole host of other things for sample processing. Its pretty powerful, in my opinion. Structure (full version) is fairly easy for assigning samples across the keyboard and editing and processing from there. There's still some features I wish it had, such as an arpeggiator, for example. But over all, I've used it many times to create new patches from audio samples.
Anyway, that's my $0.02