Ross Cobbs

I've just put the first of my meat birds in the freezer.  At 9 weeks he weighed in at 5lbs 7oz after cleaning which is just about right.  If you let them go any bigger the leg meat starts to get a bit tough.
I only do one at a time because my hands don't like plucking but this one was bigger than the others anyway.
I don't feed them intensively though they do eat a lot.  I give them outdoor space and greenstuff and corn and they are lovely, friendly, chatty birds.

Actually, they're not really Ross Cobbs although they are always called that because Ross and Cobb are (were?) two rival companies that produced commercial meat birds.

Ooh, I bet they taste like chicken is supposed to.
I get the best chicken I can by supporting our local butcher who also farms in the area and it's a lot nicer than cheap and not-cheerful birds from elsewhere.

A couple of years ago I ordered a free range chicken from our (then) local butcher - proper old-fashioned butchers who have a queue down the street at Christmas time. There meat is/was always excellent. This chicken cost three times the price of a supermarket bird, and disappointingly, I honestly couldn't tell the difference.

If you rear commercial meat breeds (Ross Cobb, Hubbard, or Sasso) there isn't any difference in taste.  You would only get that from the old meat or dual purpose breeds which take much longer to grow and not be the same sort of weights.  Having got so used to commercial chicken a lot of people wouldn't like traditional chicken meat which tends to be darker and stronger tasting.
I was initially dubious about using commercial hybrids when I first did them a few years ago but decided that the important things were a good life, no chemicals, and meat that is not pumped with water.  I grow them more slowly than a commercial producer would and enjoy them while I have them.
Happy meat is the aim.

Entirely agree with your philosophy on rearing the birds, Ploshkin.