No one is finding fault with your plan, I think that the temperature tracking during/after the cook could be a great tool.
I apologize if I sound a bit ignorant but I was looking at it from the perspective that each cut of meat has an "ideal" final cooked temperature... and I understand this can be a subjective topic. But for the sake of this context lets say the desired final cooked temperature for a brisket would be somewhere between 195 and 205.
What I'm curious about and trying to establish is the "preferred" cooking temperatures for various cuts in order to reach the desired final cooked temperature. Using the above brisket as reference would a desired cooking temperature be 230 or 240 or 250, etc for the duration?
This is a huge fallacy and the number one mistake you can make.
The entire purpose of BBQ is to cook a tough piece of meat until it is tender. Until you have a thermometer that reads in tenderness, it will not get you reliable top notch results.
As BluDawg says "You can not cook your pork butt/pork shoulder to a specific temperature and call it done!!!!"
As m-fine has said in the past, "If you have a target temp you are doing it wrong: The goal of cooking a tough cut of meat is to make it tender, not make it hot. Therefore you should monitor how tender it is, not how hot it is."
Every piece of meat is different, and therefore each will cook differently in some manner. I have had many pork butts done as low as 185 degrees, while others do not indicate being done until they reach 200 degrees or more.
Because of this variance in temperatures, I usually start checking for being done when my internal probe says 180 degrees, after that I don't pay any attention to what the internal temperature is, except for personal reference. The bone is a much better predictor than temperature, simply put When the bone wiggles like a loose tooth it's done.
I was never asking about internal final cooked temperatures. I was asking about the actual cooking session temperatures ranges people tend to use most often in order to reach the desired "tenderness" for the cut being cooked.
I am well aware there are differences in equipment and the same temperature range on one smoker will produce different results on a different smoker. At some point everyone started with a general guideline as their baseline and then adjusted from there... that's all I was asking.
You will also find that the cooking temperature also varies; not only the difference between "Low & Slow" or "Hot & Fast", but every smoker has a "Sweet Spot" where it has the most efficiency. I believe NCGrimbo had a computer application for the Stoker which would graphically track the cooking and internal temperatures. It would allow you to see real time as well as saving the graph to review at a later date.
I think if you app allowed the user to set the target temperature of the cooker it would be great. Also keep in mind that with smokers, there are temperature swings due to how the wood/charcoal burns.
Also one could set the target temperature of the meat so they know when to start checking for tenderness. The only time a specific temperature for the finished product would be followed with BBQ/Smoking would be with chicken, turkey, or a pork loin where not only a safe serving temperature is achieved, but also helping not to exceed that temperature so the meat doesn't become dry and tough.
In smoking/BBQ meats like pork butt, pork shoulder, pork picnic, beef brisket, and beef ribs have a lot of connective tissue. The idea is to cook the meat to the point where the connective tissue as been converted to collagen, which produces a tender juicy piece of meat. If the cut of meat doesn't have the connective tissue converted, it is dry and tough; where as if you exceed that point, the meat simply falls apart. The issue is the differences in the animals, as well as the type of feed, and even genetics all will help to vary the amount of connective tissue in the piece of meat. Even the right side vs the left side on the same animal will vary.