It seems there are a lot of great ways to get drum tracks in. (I started by buying a DR880)
Once you choose any quality method, there is a lot of work to do learning it.
It seems unlikely anyone could take the time to learn several of them.
So do most folks just randomly choose one method and ignore the others?

How did you choose?

I just bought this book: Drum Programming: Drum Programming: A Complete Guide to Program and Think Like a Drummer

Written by this man:

In my opinion, the best way to do a poll is to just ask.

Official "polls" usually don't offer enough selections for people to just give you a conversational answer of how they like to do it.  The answers probably won't fit into a cookie cutter poll form.  I know mine won't.  :D

Maybe if folks just say what they use and how they decided on the method or program they did?
So far because I took the time to learn it, I've been bringing Audio samples in from the DR880 and editing them into place.
I'm assuming I can do better with a more modern approach with soft synths.
Glenn

You better sit down, cause you're gonna fall down laughing if you don't ...

After over a decade of trying to get my drums to sound real, the most realistic drums I ever recorded ... were with a set of Rock Band plastic drums. I played along with a click track and did my own thing.

It taught me that it's better to do what comes natural, rather than to 'adapt' to an unnatural point and click method of doing something that you really need to feel and has a rhythm.

Now, I'm sure I could go out and spend a few grand on a nice midi set of drums, but I just can't justify that. These 4 little pads and a faux kick work just fine for getting the actual 'feel' of playing.

There are free drivers out there, and it works latency free with Sonar using Session Drummer, and SI Drums, and the 'drums' can be had for $20 bucks at your local pawn shop since the whole Rock Band craze has died ... You can even get cymbals for them ...

Yeah, I have to go in and do some velocity adjustments after the fact, but nothing IMO compares to actually playing a beat. Heck, I've even tapped a beat in to a mic and used Audio Snap to convert it to midi and brought it in to Session Drummer.

Any time you can do a live beat, it's going to sound better IMO.

But I played out live for many years and I'm used to playing with imperfect humans ... it takes some getting used to play with perfectly timed drums done in Step Sequencer ... imo.

It's much more fun to just record the real thing!  Here's how I do it:

SM57 on snare batter head
Condenser mic under snare (don't forget to flip the phase)
ATM25 inside bass drum (for good attack)
LD condener outside bass drum sound hole (for extra boom)
CAD dynamics for toms
Pair of SD condensors on overhead duties

I don't use room mics unless I have a really good room.

I used to mic drums like the live sound guys do and never liked the sound (too much over-tone).  I figured out through experimentation to pull them further from the batter heads.

Live sound guys are going for maximum gain before feedback, but for recording, you want at least 3 or 4 inches.  Use supercardioids if you want to reduce bleed.  This way you get much more fundamental tone and less overtone.

If you don't have access to real drums, the next best thing is to use E-drums. You can use E-drums even if you aren't a drummer but have enough rhythm to get it done by playing things separately and do overdubs, it is probably the easiest way to get just what you want to hear. You can keep it simple, and then edit the resulting midi file - say by playing closed high-hat, and then editing in some open high-hats to make it interesting. You can create drums for verse, chorus, bridge etc. by playing a few bars of each, quantizing and looping the sections you want to keep. Play fills and cymbals separately, later, when the song is completely written and arranged, and drop them in to replace the loop where appropriate. Any sort of velocity sensitive trigger pad(s) will do the trick, or even a midi keyboard.

If I am rolling my own I will often use QuadCore's method, just using a Midi keyboard. I have got pads on my A-Pro 800 but just seem to get on with the keys better.

If you need to quatatise I find groove quantatise the most useful, copy something with the correct groove and groove quantatise to the clipboard. Experiment with the settings until you get close and then go back an tweak individual hits as required. Useful if a part has been made in step sequencer or entered in PRV.

And a lot of the time I take the lazy approach and use a "session player" - in the form of Midi loops.
 
The drum sounds come from Toontrack Superior Drummer with various SDX and EZX packs, BFD Eco, Steven Slate Drums and some Kontakt libraries. I will also fire up Kit Core occasionaly, it used to be my goto but these days I will use it for its midi loops and the latin drums.

I do all of my drum tracks using BFD2

I used to roll them all my own, from scratch, one hit at a time, adjusting velocity/timing as I went.

Extremely laborious & time consuming.

Now, I choose a set of stock grooves from BFD's palette and manually tweak these to get the feel I want and I've gotten some great (to my ears) results from doing it this way.

I do what Jonesey does, only with Addictive Drums.
As the MIDI loops are played by real drummers, and they include ghost strokes and everything, it's very easy to get a very natural result. Tweaking the EQ's , compressors etc. is another thing.

It is so easy that I don't see any problems in learning other methods, if I needed to. But as I only use natural sounds (sometimes supported by "machine beats") AD does all I need.

I'm sure recording the real drums is the hardest, and longest way to satisfactory results, even though
when you finally get there, you have the "real stuff".