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[woolters]

I   For me,  what's the point in doing some creative artistic work, if I'm working off someone else's product? 

Why try to reinvent the wheel, when it's already there and developed and refined?
I admire your search for a unique sound, but that wouldn't work for me. I myself try to make my music sound as genuine and real as possible, so I'd rather use existing samples from existing instruments. But this is slightly off-topic right?

on-topic then...
I don't really know how many samples I have. I never counted them, and I'm not going to either
I do have them ordered per category, so Drums, Guitars, Synths, Keys, etc. After you've been using them for a couple of years you'll quickly find your way through them and after a while you know what they sound like even before hearing them.
And I do have a nice set of looped drum rhythms, but I like to chop them into drum slices so that I can eat the parts I like. Otherwise it wouldn't feel like proper tracking to me, and I like to add my own touch to them. The challenge for me is to alter the order and still make it sound nice, genuine and without silences.

[Oliwerko]

I just simply get a feeling that I have 10k samples, but none of them are actually of much use to me. Odd feeling.

Maybe VSTs are a solution? Are you able to "create" a very wide variety of samples using VSTs? Do like around 10/20 VSTis fulfill a substitute for 100/200 samples for a particular instrument?

[barryvan]

VSTs are good, but it's a lot easier to find high-quality samples than high-quality VSTis.

I recommend the synths and samplers from Native Instruments, esp. Kontakt and Massive.

[Oliwerko]

I tended to prefer samples, because for me as a beginner, the usage of VSTs is a bit challenging.

But I guess it is a must, because I can't find much usable samples in my whole library. I got plenty of samples I don't use, and almost none of what I would like to.
It's difficult.