A clicky waveform can be emulated easily. It could also be made more clicky, which would then make it even more fun, if that's what you like. If you'd identify the "unique" characteristics of e.g the SID and then intensify them in an emulator, would that make it more unique? More chip? Is it more authentic than using external effects? More purist than bending the machine?
That seems more interesting, compared to building all these additional hardware to be able to transgress the original hardware platform. If you want to make a hawt C64 coder pr0n demo today, I'm not even sure it's possible to use the original platform anymore. You have to use emulators and special tools. And then play it on a C64. Yeai/wow/etc.
Hm. I think I'll stop there.
But you wouldn't have thought to create clicky wavetables if you hadn't started with the hardware. It's totally undesirable when you first hear it. But eventually you learn to manipulate it to make something totally different than what you'd have made with clean waveforms.
Yeah, we could just start emulating all of it. Maybe there aren't anymore limits to push with the hardware. Then again, emulation doesn't really sound the same. It's hard to get a "natural" sound out of an emulator. The old hardware wasn't perfect -- it was noisy and error prone. It might sound silly but I do perfer the sound of a dmg, as opposed to any emulation I've heard. Goattracker is a pretty good emulation for c64 though.
Also, yes it's nice to experiment with new software. But then, after you have removed the constraints which shaped the software, you really have to think about what "chipmusic" means. When does it stop being chipmusic? I don't know if we even agree on what that term means.