Heretic!
Burn him!
Meat drippings are fine in a barbecue sauce, but hardly necessary. Your standard Carolina sauces, for example, don’t have drippings. I almost never put drippings in my sauce. I’m making barbecue sauce, not gravy.
While my style of barbecue generally does not apply sauce during cooking time, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using a “mop” during the cooking, and finishing off with a layer of barbecue sauce at the end if ciijubg. When you do that, and have a sauce with some type of sugar, you get a nice caramelization to it that is different from applying sauce at the end. I’m a sauce-on-the-side kind of guy, but I can appreciate those who like a glaze of barbecue sauce to finish.
My only personal rule about barbecue sauce is no liquid smoke. I don’t like the bitter creosote-y taste of it, and, besides, I generally use barbecue sauce on actual barbecue, which has plenty of smoke flavor. Liquid smoke would kind of defeat the point of me doing all that work.
People who use a mustard or mayonnaise based sauce are the same sort of people who put random vegetation in chili and ketchup on hot dogs. Meat drippings? Nonsense.
As puly said, there are mop sauces that are essential to certain styles of BBQ. But tomato or sauces with sugar should never be put on meat until the end of the cooking process.
Whoa. Somehow my fingers got shifted. That should be “of cooking.”
And don’t knock the mayonnaise sauce until you’ve tried it. It has a very specific purpose – on chicken (which some may disqualify as barbecue off the bat). It’s surprisingly nice. I prefer to go the Cornell chicken route when it comes to grilled chicken (and it’s basically just a homemade mayonnaise), but they’re both good.
A smoked, pulled pork butt doesn’t need any kind of sauce to make it the best BBQ I’ve ever had. There is rub involved of course (another religious debate) and the butt is basically smoking in its own lard, so there’s your drippings. The sauce (Eastern Carolina in my case) just adds some tang and heat.
I think the sauce really depends on the type of meat and the type of cooking. All of the sauces here make me hungry but I wouldn’t put some of them on smoked pork.
I’ve had Cornell chicken. I’ve had chicken in Arkansas with that <shudder> sauce. No thank you. Not to my tastes at all.
As my grandfather always noted “If everybody’s tastes were the same, they’d all be hot for your grandmother!”
“One half gallon of vanilla ice cream.” 
[spoiler]Detective Bill Gannon, Dragnet.
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Ah. As long as you’ve given it a fair shake. And I know we disagree on mustard sauce (which I think is just perfect for pork. I mean, how can you not like it? You seem to be a sensible guy. You don’t put ketchup on your hot dogs, so you must like mustard. And mustard and pork is one of the classic combinations!)
I agree with this philosophy. It’s not about the sauce. Barbecue should taste great without anything on it, but if you desire that accent, go for it with the sauce.
When it comes to pulled pork, I’ve gone from the simplest rubs–salt and pepper–to more complicated ones and, honestly, as long as it’s smoked well, it doesn’t seem to make all that much of a difference, unless you add the spice mix to the meat after you’ve chopped or pulled it. I mean, you have a giant hunk of pork that has a relatively thin layer of spices so, unless you get a reasonable amount of bark in your sandwich (or plate), you’re not tasting much of it. And then there’s those crazy people who don’t like bark in their sandwich.
This doesn’t keep me from continuing to do different rubs, but on pork shoulder, it’s really hard for me to note the difference unless I season the meat additionally after cooking.
I tend to agree, although I think pork marries well with a wide variety of sauces. I tend to like pork sauce towards the tarter and more “fragrant” spice end (cloves, nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, fennel, anise, etc.), while beef does a little better with a big of sweetness and earthiness, but I’ve enjoyed pork with sauces meant for beef, too. The only one I wouldn’t use on pork is the mayonnaise sauce.
Pork with a little hot mustard on the side is nice. But BBQ pork demands (nay, requires!) a vinegar-based North Carolina-style sauce. Rub that pork butt well, cook it low and slow, chop it up good (slices are ok as well, but I like the bark mixed in) and slather it with sauce. Lexington #1 is my idea of wonderful.
Make sure you add vegemite to your recipe.
You’re just trying to start a fight, aren’t you? 
Okay, okay.
Marmite is acceptable also.
Happy now?
You are very ecumenical in your weirdness, I’ll grant you that. And your tastes in cheese are beyond reproach. But still…a general rule is items that end in “…mite” might not really be food.
Its all good. Whatever you like or wanna try. I recall my childhood days where my moms idea of BBQ was to slather cheap BBQ sauce on some meat on the grill (yeah, thats not real BBQ but I do like that style as well). The real problem was her idea included turning that basted on sauce into a fully carbonized coating. I imagine Hans Solo tasted better.
I haven’t seen anyone mention paprika yet. And sometime I use a bit of curry. Hell, I get crazy and throw all kinds of random spices/stuff into my sauces. One of my favorite sauces is one I can’t make regularly. It was a basic sauce but it had a special ingredient. It was the left over pepper pulp from the Tabassco Hot Sauce company. Most of the heat was gone but there was still plenty of flavor.
I don’t care much for lemon and never have limes around so when I used to make tomato based BBQ sauce I always added a splash of orange juice.
Lately I have been taking the real easy route and using Alton Brown’s bastardized Carolina(s) sauce on pulled pork; just mix mustard and sweet pickle juice. Couldn’t be any easier and very tasty.
I have a theory about things like this. They are only suggested by old men who have killed off their taste buds with years of drinking and smoking. The old men crave extremely strong tasting things like blue cheese stuffed olives and vegemite because otherwise the food is tasteless.
I am old man who like blue cheese stuffed olives but do not quite yet need to resort to vegemite to feel alive.
Oh, come on, have you ever even tried dynamite?
I have, it tastes like burning. And causes one hell of a headache.
Really.
New flavor opportunities are dancing lessons from God.
Some seek the Lost Chord, I seek the 6th Taste.