Just wanted to chime in on that. There's nothing wrong with recording MIDI data from eDrums. Actually the recorded MIDI data will capture all the nuances of your original performance. If you then play it back through your Roland sound module you should get the same sound as if you were playing it. The problem you had was not because you recorded MIDI data, but because you messed with it by quantization. You should never mess with the MIDI data (except of course to fix some minor mistakes if you want to). But do not ever quantize everything, that's a huge mistake and it will totally kill your performance.
The advantage of recording MIDI instead of audio is that you can later use some better software to reproduce the drum sounds. Superior Drummer is one of the very best around, you should really give it a try. The internal sounds from Roland modules are very artificial, anyone can tell they are not coming from a real drum kit. The best way to do it would be to play your eDrums kit but using the MIDI Out to trigger the Superior Drummer sounds instead of the internal ones. That way you can hear yourself playing the more realistic drum sounds while recording, so what you hear is exactly what will be the final result. If you don't have Superior Drummer (or a similar software), which seems to be the case, then the next best thing would be to record your drums normally, using the sounds from your module and then also recording the MIDI data together with the audio. By doing that, you can later on use the MIDI data to trigger the Superior Drummer, and the audio track could be used as reference in case you have some non-standard note mappings in your module.
Just to give you an idea of how good it sounds, I have a friend who is a top session drummer here in Brazil. He is used to record in the best studios with great sound engineers. He has a Roland VDrums kit in his apartment for practising, which he also uses sometimes when he wants to record some guide tracks at home. One day I took my laptop to his apartment and we used Superior Drummer to record some performances from his VDrums kit (which is something he'd never done before). He was amazed by the results. When I sent him a rough mix the next day he said it totally sounded like himself playing a real kit, he just could't tell the difference.
Another example was with my old band Mahtrak, when the guitarrist once brought in some demos of his compositions for us to hear. His tracks had some very good jazz-rock drumming (think Billy Cobham style) and our drummer was amazed and asked who was the drummer who recorded it. He laughed and said it was BFD (another software similar to Superior Drummer). It turns out he had programmed all the drum parts manually (he doesn't have an eDrum kit), but he took great care in making it sound realistic (for example, turning off snap to grid option so when inserting the notes they don't fall exactly on grid, adjusting velocities so they have some variation, including ghost notes, flams, drags, rolls and everything else a real drummer would do). So it is even possible to get a very realistic performance without playing any drums at all, but this is a lot of work and the result is not always perfect. The best way to do it really is to play it on electronic drums so that you get all the nuances of a real player in real time (instead of taking days to painstakingly insert every single note and make it sound realistic).
Just my 4 cents on the subject, hope it helps... and good luck with your recordings!
Bookmarks