I'm interested in what tended to go wrong for you with the reverse sear. One tricky thing is that the temperature increases nonlinearly, so if you take a couple readings and get a mental trajectory of when it's going to hit 115, you're likely to be wrong. The flip side though is that cooking at 250 (or, sheesh, 200, as they're doing across the thread) gives you a _real big bulls-eye_ to hit.

Nobody's gonna say that a circulator steak is bad. It's the second-best way to cook a steak. :)