Stories about the resurgence of cooking techniques that eschew modern technology have me wondering how much of the flavor and taste improvement is actually because of the technique itself.

> With gas-assisted smokers, pitmasters can load their machines with meat (likely briskets and pork shoulders) at the end of service, add a few logs, and sleep soundly without fear the fire will die during the night. This high-tech approach typically eats up less wood and requires fewer employees to watch over the smoker, two significant pluses in a competitive urban marketplace where skilled pitmasters can be hard to find.

This aside makes me suspect that an equally significant contributor to better quality might simply be the increased human attention. If you've cooked with any degree of rigor, you have probably witnessed the variation in outcomes with the exact same technique. The way to reduce that variation and maintain quality is to pay close attention to the raw materials and adjust the cooking process continuously.

A way to test this hypothesis would be have the same number of people tending a gas-supplemented smoker as well as a traditional one and see how wide the delta is in the meat.