To the collective artists known as Skulltunes :

[death on a stick]

I thought I was "cheating" by using loops and trying to "hide" them in fx and eq

I don't think any method is cheating. Ultimately the only thing that matters is what comes out at the end - the music. It just happens that some methods seem to consistently produce very low quality music, and as has been illustrated here, some methods can show people up as unimaginative and unoriginal in their thought processes.