Oven good, Pre-sets and cook-book, not so much

Owned for over a year. Others have reviewed the features so I won't.

Everything works as advertised so far.

The many pre-set cooking methods and food recipes are only partially adjustible (usually temp and time only), but the absence of manual override and control the four options (micro, convection, top-grill, bottom-grill) leaves you stuck with a one-proportion-fits-all for each pre-programmed food cooking "recipe" - making me wonder if the options were designed by engineers (who, by nature or nurture, always assume that everyone should have their taste) or cooks (who know better).

The asymetrical top and bottom "grills" are "interesting" too. The top is a set of conventional heating rods directly exposed to the food, but the bottom heating element is always covered by the heavy metal revolving carousel which means that for food, on the elevated grill-stand, to receive radiant heat from below, that whole carousel pan has to be heated to near, but not, glowing temp - hardly an arrangement that would yield equal grilling on both sides (and it doesn't) nor the symetry one would expect in a "double, top and bottom grill" as advertised.

Ridgid recipes: Consider the humble, but expensive, fresh mahi-mahi fish filet (probably containing more water than the not-so-fresh variety). Naively trusting it to the Shape's preprogammed method, I spent some time cleaning the steam-exploded fish-parts out of every nook and crany after a less than enjoyable meal.

Ok, everything takes some trial and error and study, if necessary, but with a few advanced technical degrees under my belt, I couldn't make heads or tails of their so-called cookbook. It sprinkels single food items, that item's cooking methods, and that item's special notes seemingly randomly throughout and ends without an index, so one's left to read all pages each time to find all the various references to say pork, chops, their number, and their sizes.

When you do finally think that you've cornered all entries and a proper recommended button-push sequence (e. g., grill, 1, etc), it does not tell you what your getting regarding the proportion of grill, micro or convect, so there is no way to know, when it doesn't work for you, what got too much or too little or give you a known experience upon on which you can systematically improve - who knows what was done. As the cooking-method proportions aren't independently programmable I guess it doesn't make much difference but, just be advised that this product will take an extrodinary amount of food-insight and trial-and-error to realize its full potential which is, after all's said and done, pretty good but not great.