That is what my better half and a couple of my friends have told me, as far as getting what you want. I am a somewhat frugal person and this will almost certainly be my last smoker and want to get it right.
If not for the convenience of pellet smokers ( that is main attraction for me) I would order a LSG insulated Mini cabinet and call it a day and know that my Q would meet my standards.
You know, with a fan system, those insulated cabinets will run pretty close to a pellet smoker in terms of temp control and therefore convenience. I've been pretty vocal against pellet cookers in the past, and then I got myself a Rec-Tec BFG...outside of that particular cooker having issues (I sent it back, got a full refund), the "pellet life style" just wasn't for me. One thing of note is that pellets are actually quite expensive versus wood / charcoal.
Note : I run a BBQ food truck so I'm running my smoker 3-4 days a week. When I was running the BFG with pellets I was going through about 30-40 Lbs of pellets every cook. That's about $30 for each cook and in all honesty the smoke flavor was so light on the meat that it wasn't really noticeable...smoke rings were beautiful but no smoke smell when cooking and no smoke flavor when eating. I tried the "Xtreme Smoke" setting on the Rec-Tec and all it did was cycle the fan on and off to keep the temp at about 180° and in doing so my entire cooking chamber was covered in soot. Just using that Xtreme Smoke setting for an hour took me longer than that to wipe all that soot out of the cooking chamber. When I run my offset I'm spending about $3-5 a day on wood...compare that to $30 and it's kind of a huge expense.
I will also be honest : the "Rec-Tec Lifestyle" was an extremely cringey thing and it was really off-putting in terms of their brand. I know it's a silly thing to bring up but grown men singing "Doo doo doo" over and over is just odd. haha
Overall I think that if an insulated cabinet is really what you want, then maybe go with that. Most of those things will hold temp just fine on their own once dialed in, but if you put a fan system on you're going to get temperature control similar to a pellet cooker. This also allows you to cook with charcoal and wood, which is much cheaper than pellets.
Since I like to write a lot I'll put this here as well :
Rec-Tec : After about a month with my Rec Tec 2500 (BFG) I started having serious temperature control issues. The left side of the cooker was about 100° cooler than the right side...it was taking me over 24 hours at 250° to cook pork butts. Rec-Tec tried to fix it by sending me a new door as the one that came with the unit didn't fit properly : there was at least a 1" gap on the right side while the left side sat flush. So I put on the new door and now I had about a 1/8" gap all around, so that seemed better. Unfortunately after I put on the new door the cooker started behaving erratically...the bottom shelf was now about 100° OVER the set-temp, although the system was telling me it was perfect, ie set temp was 250° and the RTD probe was saying it was 250°. In reality that bottom shelf was cooking at roughly 375°. I spent a couple of weeks on the phone with Rec-Tec customer service trying to fix it, but no matter what we did it just kept on burning up the meat. When the cooking chamber was empty it ran just fine, but once I put in a cold piece of meat the system just couldn't seem to figure out how to function properly. I lost 10 racks of ribs one day...put them on for 4 hours at 250° and took a nap...came out to check on them and they were burnt to a crisp...I mean literally burned beyond recognition and stiff as a board. That was the final straw and Rec Tec was very good about taking the cooker back and giving me a full refund.
Yoder : I have no input on their pellet cookers, but I did (unfortunately) end up buying one of their small offset smokers; the Cheyenne. The cooker was built beautifully but it never functioned properly because of a drafting issue caused by their flawed design. I spent 2 years beating my head against the wall trying to figure it out, and then I found this forum and a thread on here about the Yoder Wichita which had the same issues as my Cheyenne. The only reason I bring this up is because of how Yoder handled the situation : they had a very poor reaction and chose to erase threads on their forum about it, and essentially tell the owners of their smokers that we were doing something wrong. They even went so far as to produce a video about "fire maintenance" where they said we needed to use kiln-dried wood, pre-heat that wood INSIDE the firebox, and it was pretty absurd and insulting. No other commercial offset smokers require that kind of silliness and Yoder spent years with their head in the sand telling us were just didn't know how to use a cooker. FINALLY, about 2 years ago, they altered their design to address the flow issue, and offered "fixes" for the smokers which were already out to customers...though we had to pay for shipping and then find a welder / fabricator to remove the old firebox door and put on the new one.
So I'd never recommend Yoder to anyone for anything just because of their poor customer service.
Just my 2 cents in this whole scenario.
