Preimage sampling is a fundamental tool in lattice-based cryptography, and its performance directly impacts that of the cryptographic mechanisms relying on it. In 2012, Micciancio and Peikert proposed a new way of generating trapdoors (and an associated preimage sampling procedure) with very interesting features. Unfortunately, in some applications such as digital signatures, the performance may not be as competitive as other approaches like Fiat-Shamir with Aborts. In an effort to improve preimage sampling for Micciancio-Peikert (MP) trapdoors, Lyubashevsky and Wichs (LW) introduced a new sampler which leverages rejection sampling but suffers from strong parameter requirements that hampered performance. As a consequence it seemed to be restricted to theoretical applications and has not been, to our knowledge, considered for real-world applications. Our first contribution is to revisit the LW sampler by proposing an improved analysis which yields much more compact parameters. This leads to gains on the preimage size of about 60% over the LW sampler, and up to 25% compared to the original MP sampling technique. It thus sheds a new light on the LW sampler, opening promising perspectives for the efficiency of advanced lattice-based constructions relying on such mechanisms. To provide further improvements, we show that it perfectly combines with the approximate trapdoors approach by Chen, Genise and Mukherjee, but with a smaller preimage error. Building upon those results, we introduce a hash-and-sign signature scheme called Phoenix. The scheme is based on the M-LWE and M-SIS assumptions and features attractive public key and signature sizes which are even smaller than those of the most recent gadget-based construction Eagle of Yu, Jia and Wang (Crypto'23). Moreover, Phoenix is designed to support a broad variety of distributions (uniform, spherical Gaussian, etc) which can facilitate implementation, in particular in constrained environments.