Any kind of meat will get tender if it is cooked long enough. But, it can also get so dry and tasteless so as to be worthless. A thick sauce can cover this up to a certain degree, especially if the meat is cubed small, as it seems it is for your chili. I have found with slow cookers, that if you are trying to cook a too-small quantity the liquid can come too close to boiling, which toughens the meat. Browning small-cube meat can be problematic in a similar way...in the course of getting it brown enough, it is cooked completely through and can toughen too much. My solution for this is to brown the meat in larger chunks, so as to get the lovely flavor for my dish, but without cooking through. Then I dice the browned pieces.

hard boll makes meat tough. If you cook it for too many hours and hours it will disintegrate to just meat strings. I put mine into my Le C dutch oven with enough water to just cover and a quartered onion and the flavor packet....bring it to a simmer and put the whole thing into the oven at about 212 ( half way between 225 and 200) and cook it 4 or 5 hours. Then I take it out and put it on a burner and add my potatoes carrots and when they are nearly done 20 to 30 minutes, I add a quartered cabbage! Ummmm!!!!

I have all three as well. PC's are excellent timesavers--steamed artichokes in 12-14 minutes instead of 45. Excellent for quickly tenderizing cuts of meat. (Great curry dishes in 20 minutes.) And sometime this week I'm gonna make corned beef & cabbage in just a little more than an hour. And I find that I prefer osso buco made in the PC to the non-PC way. Also, with a PC I can make foolproof risotto with hardly any effort and very little time, so I end up making risotto more often. (Indeed, Kuhn Rikon markets a small PC as a 'risotto maker'.) Dutch ovens are great for unfussy cooking; starting something on the stovetop and then finishing them in a slow oven is their forte. If you like this technique, take a look at Molly Stevens' All About Braising. Great resource. I have found that since I got into PC cooking I don't use my slow cooker as much. Slow cookers are great for stews, chili, beans and other things where the timing isn't critical--but the pressure cooker is very good on beans and grains as well, in about a third the time. If you want to work more grains and beans into your menus, a pressure cooker really is worthwhile. Lorna Sass, the pressure cooker expert, has written a pressure cooker cookbook precisely aimed at vegetarians. (See the link.) If I had to give up any one of those gadgets, it would be the slow cooker. I definitely wouldn't give up my PC, and I really like the enameled cast iron Dutch ovens as well. Here is a link that might be useful: vegetarian pressure cooker cookbook

There's a reason you cannot find a comparable cooker today. Those old cookers weren't safe. The problem is, those old cookers didn't get hot enough to cook food safely--so the newer ones are hotter to prevent the growth of bacteria. I don't think you're going to be able to find a new crockpot that cooks as slowly as those old ones do. And that's a good thing--your family's health is far more important. Look, why not adapt your crockpot recipes to FAST cooking. I haven't found a crock pot recipe yet that I can't convert into a 30 minute (or less) meal. The less time you run your appliances, the more energy $$$ you save. The faster you cook your food, the more nutrients and flavor you conserve. I'd rather cook 20-30 minutes in the evening, and serve my family healthy, fresh food, than save 5 minutes of my prep time and give them something that's been heating all day. Isn't that the complaint people generally have about cafeterias and other inexpensive restaurants? That the food has been sitting around and sitting around? If it's not good enough for you when you go out to eat, WHY would anyone consider that adequate for the family they love? Sorry, I get a little over-the-top about crockpots. It's such a wasteful (in so many ways) way to cook food, and I'm such a proponent of fresh, nutrient-packed dishes for my family, that I really become passionate when this topic comes up.