The 808 was never going to sound good as a substitute for real drums. But, they sound great in dance music productions and that's why they've never gone away. They cut through a mix and sound fantastic in clubs. 808 kicks are still very widely used in EDM and electronica. It's like 303's - originally designed as a kind of crude bass accompanist for keyboard players, the acid house guys quickly caught onto how amazing it sounds when the resonance of the filter is cranked up and you sweep the cutoff. A whole new style of music was born that was so iconic that the 303's are still highly sought after and used in a lot of electronic music. It makes you wonder why the actual units themselves are so coveted - I mean after all it's really just a basic oscillator with a pretty ordinary filter. Some have said that the oscillator and filter are unique and that's what give it it's sound, but really what makes a 303 sound so unique is the sequencer and the way it plays slides, ties and accents. Maybe that's the case with the 808 as well - the sequencer has a particular feel to it which people have come to know and love. 

There is nothing wrong with gated reverb either.  If it is used tastefully within a very new and modern piece of music then it will sound new and modern as well.  A lot depends on what is surrounding the gated reverb at the time.  The gate on the reverb now has a lot of control over how the reverb is perceived too.  I think it is more about the 80's music that was happening at the time.  Keep making music like that and it will always sound like that.
 
With the 808 it was about the sounds too not so much how the sequencer felt for me.  It always felt locked in to the rest of the music very tight when I used it.  Other drum machines had a more definitive feel such as a Linn Drum. I used all the available outputs on the TR808 which allows you to sculpt the sound much better.  Kicks can be turned into huge earth shattering sounds. Hats can be super thin and clean and crisp too.  Effects on certain sounds only.  I had other powerful drum machine sounds happening in unison with 808 sounds for extra power and depth.  I have also done many electronic tracks playing a live fully miced kit alongside 808 drum/percussion parts. They go together well. 

bitflipper
I had an actual 808 back in the day. I hated it. "That doesn't sound anything like a bass drum", I thought. But it was affordable and fun to program. Nevertheless, it went into the junk drawer the moment I figured out how to do a believable kick on a synthesizer. And that, in turn, quickly fell by the wayside when I got an Alesis with real sampled drums inside.
 
At no point along that journey did I ever once feel the least bit nostalgic for that boring gated sinewave. So I am mystified as to why young producers of today, with the mindblowing cornucopia of sound available to them, would want to use that tired old hack.
 
Unless it's me that's the tired old hack.

Like you, I dumped my roland drums when Alesis drums became available. I quickly regretted it. The 808 never was a real drum replacement. By the same token, some things just work. For dance music that sound will likepy always work. Also keep in mind, in modern-day music, "808" refers to basically any low end distorted sine wave based sound. Most of these 808 sample soundpacks use synths to create 808 samples. 808 is getting close to becoming a generic term like jello.

Btw, the kicks on the original hr16 were a pain in the mix. The hr16b did a better job by basically emulating a roland

I was and actually still am a huge Genesis fan, and rather uncooly, I preferred Collins to Gabriel on the mic as far as their 70s output was concerned. I even quite liked a lot of Phil's solo stuff, but I couldn't stay in the room with that drum sound on In The Air Tonight. I hated it, whilst the rest of the world eulogised. And now, for the first time I know it was gated reverb. This forum is an education 😜

I'm agnostic about sounds. They're just sounds, after all. When I was engineering in the 80s I had a big plate, not an EMT, but a credible knockoff. Often I would crank it down as tight as it would go, which would make the decay very short, and send the snare to it. I only had 16 tracks, and I knew I would need the plate for mixdown, so I'd return the plate to the snare track and record it that way. I didn't have to use a gate to get that gated effect, and the sound was huge. It sounded less like reverb and more like 50 field snares in perfect unison. Drummers and producers loved it. At some point the pop drum trend drifted toward the "one-mic-20-feet-away" sound, and I had to stop doing that.
 
But I would do it again if I could - I just can't seem to duplicate it with modern electronics.

I never liked the results I got with gated reverb in the box. Not until I got FabFilter Pro-G. That thing's so configurable you can get any kind of envelope you want with it.
 
BTW, I did try the experiment described weeks ago, using an unrelated track as the gate's sidechain. I had mixed results. Turns out, when a track is unrelated to the drums, it doesn't always make for a very musical trigger. However, if you create a track specifically for that purpose, it's a whole new ballgame.
 
I used a pluck-type synth patch (Zebra) and routed it to a compressor rather than a gate. That gave me a trigger whose envelope was completely configurable. Even modulate-able. It was a fun exercise, but in the end I decided it's not worth the bother because Pro-G gives me all the control I need. And if I only want gating in places, like say just on the chorus, I can automate Pro-G.
 
Hmm, now that I'm relating that story, it has just occurred to me that a sequence or arp could do some crazy things to the reverb...

One interesting sound I've gotten with reverb recently is to send the drums to a short ambience or room reverb, and crank up the predelay to something which sounds like a noticeable note value (like 200ms or the nearest musical value). The decay must be short enough to die out between drum hits. If you shape the tone of it just right (cut the lows and leave some nice high end) it becomes almost like a piece of percussion in itself, filling in the spaces with some nice bright ambience and air. Adds some lovely depth. Wouldn't use it on every track, but as a short "specially effect" to bring in for a few measures, I really like it.

I've been doing that for years, except that I use a delay plugin rather than the reverb's built-in predelay. That lets me have a predelay that's tempo-synced and therefore follows my tempo changes. It can also be a more realistic-sounding room delay than using a delay alone. With longer reverb tails it can also fatten the tails with feedback.

On the subject of cool things you can do with Pro-G and reverb, I'm especially fond of using its ducking mode on acoustical guitars and such. Things that have percussive attacks and long sustains. I can stick in a long, thick reverb that would be oppressive normally but with the gate it only increases the sustain of held notes. You might not even know there was reverb on it until you mute it or solo the reverb bus.