BUT, we have not been able to put it all together for all 4 meats in 1 contest and win a grand. will we ever do that? I would like to think so, in time.
You will, and unless you're in exceptionally stellar competition, 3 will do just fine.
We won our first GC's this year, the second one we cooked 11th Chicken, 1st Ribs, 2nd Pork and 1st Brisket. It took us 10'ish competitions to put it all together for few balanced cooks.
My team mate lives around 95 miles away and we've trained exactly once together, ever.
We live in a country which is separated by water from almost every other country in the world, so we have to fly into competitions.
Our regular competition season is 2-3 competitions a year, since flying in makes everything so much harder to arrange.
We need to borrow everything from somebody else. And we are pretty broke, so that's also that..
I fly with hand luggage only and meat cooler is my hold luggage. We also fly low-cost, sometimes that means multiple changes and other nice things.
And the need to weight our luggage to the gram to avoid overcharges :grin:
The point is this... It's not about the stuff, the cooker, or the size of the rig. Does it help? Sure.
Do you need all that to win? Probably not, but granted it's much nicer to sleep in a campervan than in a sleeping bag with broken zipper. I have only experience of the latter...