The great leap backwards has occurred. It always happens that when there's a product that you're perfectly happy with, someone is going to improve it and screw it all up. This has definitely happened with the gas grill. 10 years ago I went to the store and bought a gas grill for a little over a hundred dollars. I cooked on it often, and it was great. After 10 years of cooking and sitting out in my yard, the burner and grill bottom disintegrated. But I was pleased because I had gotten enough use out of it. It was time to buy another. I went shopping. The first thing that surprised me was that so few gas grills are available now for under $200. Most are very expensive. I don't want to pay $400 or more for something that I'm going leave out in my yard. I didn't really see any improvements that justified the price increase, but that's today's market. I found one, a Thermos, for about $160. When I got it home and assembled, I discovered that it didn't come with a tank. My old one had a tank included, but now you have to pay an extra $30 to get one. Well ok, that's what it cost to grill with gas in 2003. At least now I was ready to cook. I was bothered by the price thing and the tank thing, but it's how this new grill cooks that is most upsetting. It seems that over the last couple of years there’s been a technological break through in gas grill design that has made the ceramic briquette a thing of the past. The briquettes have been replaced by a flame tent heat distribution system. The tent is a piece of sheet metal maybe 4 inches wide that goes over the gas flames across the width of the grill. It has an angle bent in it down the middle length wise, so it forms a tent over the flame. There is one of these tents over each row of flames. When grease drips on the hot tent, it flames up and makes nice smoke, just like a grill should, so you’d think that this would be an okay thing. But there’s a problem. The tent just works too well at distributing the heat. Instead of cooking like a charcoal grill, the tent system cooks like an electric oven. The meat is surrounded by nice even temperature hot air that cooks it very uniformly. Grease dripping on the tent does make flames and smoke to give the meat some grilled flavor, but you just don’t have the ability to put the heat to the meat like you could with briquette based gas grills. I cooked some sausages with the gas going full bore. They cooked through nice and evenly, but they were still white on the outside when they were done. There wasn’t anything I could do to make them brown using this grill. With my old briquette grill, there were occasional grease fires that made things too hot, but I never had a problem creating enough heat to sear or brown whatever I was cooking. I knew that I would never use this new grill, because I could get the same results cooking inside using my electric oven, so I took it apart and returned it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s defective. Target very graciously accepted the return. I thought that perhaps the problem was that I’m just too cheap. Maybe if I had spent more, I would have been happy with my grills performance. But, I’ve since been to a cookout at my friends’ house. They had a new and more expensive Weber grill. It too had tents instead of briquettes, and it too cooked uniformly but left the surface of a fine steak white. It isn’t one manufacturer or model. They’ve all copied the first one to screw it up, and now they’re all screwed up. Well, I’ve had it, and I’m not going to take it. People knew how to make a good gas grill twenty years ago, and if they’re not going to make a good one now, I’m cooking on charcoal until they rediscover their roots. I want my ceramic briquettes.