F.A.O Cliff,
Trying to point you in the direction of tunes that are doing some interesting stuff in my opinion, try and download the following:
Funky house - Blaze featuring barbara tucker - most precious love
Tech House - Yoshimoto - Do what you du
Hard House - Heavens Cry - till tears do us part
Bouncy House - Pitchin 2004
Trance - Thrillseekers - Synaesthasia (think i spelt it right!)
If you can't download them on kazaa or similar you will deffo get short mp3 samples of them on http://www.htfr.com or http://www.juno.co.uk
They may not be to your taste, but try them at least, they are my fave's for each genre and go down pretty well in a club environment!
You obviously do have a good understanding of music patterns if you can recognise house is 4/4 and waltz is 3/3 etc, its just with me dealing with the club/dance/dj scene that we never see patterns other than 4/4, but i agree, in the right situation, other patterns can work well.
Let me know what you think of the above recommendations!