Stickburners are amazing and a lot of fun, but there are certainly days where it's nice to have a charcoal smoker so I don't have to feed it all night long.
Meadow Creek makes some quality stuff, but I just can't get over their sky-high prices. And they are especially high priced when you start looking at the trailer version of their smokers.
Lonestar Grills appears to make some nice stuff, but again, once you get into the trailer models it seems to get more expensive than some of the other builders out there.
You might want to look into Johnson Smokers as their trailer rigs are solid, but they aren't overpriced. I had their "Ultimate Chargrill Trailer" and it's still the best smoker I've ever had in my life. I bought it for my BBQ food trailer business and I used it for the first 6 months or so. The only problem was that it didn't have enough capacity as my business grew really quickly, so I had to find another cooker quickly!
www.johnsonsmokers.com If I had the money and was buying a new smoker today this is probably what I would have bought.
https://johnsonsmokers.com/med-6-ft/
I've never really felt like the warming boxes / cabinets were very useful...just in my opinion. For keeping the food warm I use Cambro's and I feel like it works better anyways. That 6' medium cooker is a 30" x 84" reverse flow smoker with an absolute TON of cooking space.
Last time I checked Chad Johnson was about 3 months out in terms from when you place the order until your smoker is ready, but I'm sure that fluctuates all the time. If you do plan on going with Johnson I would request a single door with counterweights rather than double doors. And I would also request that the racks span the entire width of the smoke chamber; that is that you'll have 1 upper rack and 1 lower rack, rather than 2 of each. Just having that split between the doors and the racks actually steals a bunch of cooking space when you start cooking large meats. It also makes it much more difficult to cook whole animals if that's something you would ever want to do.
Couple notes on reverse flow versus traditional flow; this will be in general as not every smoker functions the same way.
Traditional Flow : will usually have a hot zone near the firebox side, and an even spot in the middle, and then cold spots near the exhaust. You can use this to your advantage and cook your larger meats nearer the hot spots and your smaller or thinner meats in other spots. This would also allow you to do something like cook chicken close to the firebox while doing briskets in the middle at a lower temperature. The big drawback here is that you'll usually need to rotate your meat as all the heat when doing a long cook.
Reverse Flow : If done properly the entire cooking rack (from left to right) should be an even temperature. On my 60" Johnson Smoker I was usually within 5° from left to right when I was cooking. The upper racks were usually 15-20° hotter than the bottom racks, but were still even from left to right. This allowed me to load that smoker up and not worry about rotating meat or turning meat as there were no hot spots.
Good luck moving forward and there's tons of great pitbuilders out there. I don't know of any in the pacific northwest though, so you're going to end up paying for shipping. I would still wager that if you do some good research, even with shipping costs, you can get a cooker the same size (or bigger) than Meadow Creeks prices.
Something to look into for shipping are companies like
www.uship.com I was able to get my smoker shipped from Texas to North Carolina for about $700. It was a trip of about 1200 miles, and you're about 2000 miles from most of the Texas pitbuilders. So that might help you in estimating what kind of shipping costs you'd be looking at.
