Personally, I like to get the dancers dancing and the 'spotters 'spotting: I like having the whooping, screaming, yelling, jacking, climbing the walls AND the googly eyed "what's he doing?!? What's that record?!" You don't have to dance to recognise that it's a pretty similar achievement: everyone comes away saying, damn he/she banged it out - *that's* what I'm after.
As to how you do it, do it any way you want to. I used to do tricks far more than I do now, I now never scratch beyond the odd second copy doubling up, and I pretty much conform to Cyclone's "sleep house" school of DJing. I certainly *wouldn't* say that the mix supercedes the records - quite the opposite - and in any case, it's just something that I have observed works better for the music I play. Some of the "sleep house" gang would say that mixing it up in the Mills style is mix over content, but they'd be equally wrong. It's horses for courses, and I suppose a good DJ will adapt accordingly. In my case, it's certainly not lack of skill - I'm relying on some charity here :) - nor is it some deeper than thou homage to the house canon, it just works for me. Not to say there aren't style over content DJs, but they're the *real* boring ones. All just IMHO.
