Samples are just the individual sounds recorded and put into the program. If your talking about the melodic instruments, those were made by me using plugins like harmor. You can make digital drums, but aside from 8-bit, its almost always better to just use recordings of drums because they have a much higher quality and tend to sound more natural (whether you record them yourself or not). i honestly think that the fact that someone used samples shouldn't reduce the rating of a song. while you may not prefer to use them that doesn't mean that everyone shares your opinion, or that it's the best way to go, and from the looks of your comment i don't think you would have been able to tell they were samples or not if i hadn't have talked about it in the description. This is just my take on it though, and you are entitled to your own opinions, so if the fact that i used drum samples in my song makes it less appealing to you, then there is not much i can do about it.

P.S. Who said that optimizing and mastering samples for a given piece isn't hard work? :)