It is so easy to drag and drop, edit and slice any audio in Cubase and the integration with HALion is so good I do not need a dedicated sampling option. I hope HALion developers will focus more on creative developments instead of filling HALion with legacy-like functions and bloat the software code. However HALion is a feature monster, it is still easy to use after studying, so they should keep it somewhat simple yet powerful.
Sure, hw samplers have a vibe that we may miss (personally I worked a lot on the hw E-MU Ultra serie, it was great at that time). On the software side, e.g. there is a built-in sampling into Reason but I am sure only a few know the real technical limitations of that kind of sampling in practice.
Today I would not swap the “sample-player-only” HALion 4.x for any current hw or sw with built-in sampling capabilities.