Though, Renoise has so many buttons and menus and stuff on the screen, it could scare off the impatient quite easily. I find it difficult to quickly see what the menus/buttons are for. But the advanced automated features make up for the lack of simplicity so that, once you have gotten use to it, it truly is a great tracker.
Running FT2 with Gravis Ultrasound on DOSBox has so far worked perfectly for me. If you notice a little lag, you may press Ctrl+F12 a few times, but avoid increasing the clock cycles too much as it will cause latency problems with the sound. Sound Blaster works good, too, although there is that amplification problem (FT2 mentions the problem in the help) and PC Speaker even works better than in reality on DOSBox (no extreme lag despite a fast computer).