Get out your umbrella because I'm going to try and piss all over your gearlust.
For your stated purpose, I don't think you should buy hardware. In my experience, and it is just mine, but taking loops out through the audio i/o through hardware, and back into the audio i/o is just not efficient, not fun, not fast, doesn't sound the best, is unpredictable, and on and on.
Let me tell you what I've found the hardware good for: for working outside the box, then taking it in. In this situation a good pre, comp, eq can be really nice. Just get the sound all trimmed up and hardware vibed and THEN take it into the box where it can be worked with.
Imo, if you care about sound, and are doing things for sound, you've got to have really high quality DA
AND AD to warrant two layers of conversion.
Latency going out, coming in is an annoying bitch, and if you get jitter, you're fuuuuuucked.
Doesn't Reason have some plugin format now? Can't you get a good comp now?
And now to restate: If you have a hardware synth or sampler, or are recording audio, having some sound processing makes sense. You can put extra layers of audio voodoo sauce on your sounds, and I promise, I absolutely promise, your songs will sound a little different than all itb songs.
You can do hardware wrong, and in doing so, miss the ways to do hardware right.
These are my thoughts at least. I wish you the best. Don't spend too much time on sounds, your beats are already sounding great, and more importantly are inventive and interesting. I'd just like to hear more from you. I don't want anything coming along slowing you down.
Oh shit, one last thing, check out Warm Audio at
http://www.warmaudio.com/ for something that actually adds excitement, something that is really worth the trip out and in. Never used it, don't know what the reviews say at all, but have heard several demos that promptly removed my socks. Seriously. And very very affordable for what you get.
experience. 
. Yea it would literally just be out then in to my interface. Coming out of the leftover outputs and into in 1,2 so I can put something thru it any time
