Something just clicked to me when I posted the "Remember: Vaping is not smoking" comment. I see you keep saying "tobacco" and I have a couple questions for you.
1) Which tobacco are you looking for, e.g., Perique, Burley, Virgina, Latakia, flue, fire or air cured, etc?
2) If looking for a "tobacco" flavor, what previous experience do you want it to taste like? Vaping provides a new way to experience tobacco, but it is not related all that much to chewing or smoking. Luckily my love for tobacco in a broader sense came from vaping, so I am not chasing cigars or pipe dreams.
Have been smoking American Spirits medium for a long time. I have also smoked pipe and cigars. Dunhill, Davidoff, John Aylesbury pipe tobacco = amazing flavors; Partagas, EP Carrillo, Churchill, Fuente Fuente Forbidden X and other similar cigars = amazing flavors; bold, distinctive, memorable, layered and complex flavors. Amazing.
But to answer your questions:
1) People often mention that since they stopped smoking analogs, they do not want to vape anything that resembles cigarettes/tobacco. I happened to love the flavor of tobacco, so I am not interested in fruit/desert vapes, though I did like Roar Vapor's Strapple Serum, JV's Ecto Plasma and a few others. Want2Vape and MOV have awesome coffee flavors. Clearly, when it comes to food-based flavors, there are many great juices out there with bold, distinctive and memorable flavors, but for some reason, probably because most people are not interested in tobacco flavors, tobacco juices are lagging behind food-based flavors.
That having been said, I am not looking for a vape that isolates a specific tobacco. I am simply looking for a real pipe or cigar tobacco flavor, like Devil Dog, London or Paris, for example, but stronger and more complex. In my opinion, throat hit and vapor production aside, the only difference between those three is their peatiness. There is nothing else going on there. The flavor is one demential and "flat," if you will.
2)Ideally, when it comes to a flavor profile, I do not see why a tobacco vape cannot be the same or better than the real pipe or cigar tobaccos I have mentioned above, or even analogs, such as Rothmans International, original Kent and John Player Special.
In fact, I would think that, given the amount of flavors available, it would be relatively easy to replicate, say, Davidoff's flavor or any other real tobacco flavor for that matter. Compared to real tobacco, liquid flavors allow for a lot more flexibility and virtually limitless possibilities, but it does take expertise. You cannot just wing it, you need to be a very good chemist to do it right.
If you can't tell the difference in a blind taste-test between "Patriot, Fire Cured Tobacco, Virginia, Baco, Legend, Smooth Criminal, White Beard, etc" (OMG, are you serious!?!?!?!), I would really be looking into hardware over juice hunting.
No disrespect, but I bet most people,
in a real blind test, would not be able to tell the difference either.
I believe I have a pretty good palate and I have some experience with blind testing food flavors. Blind testing is very tricky. Believe it or not, even professional chefs often have difficulties correctly identifying basic food flavors in a blind test. It is not as easy as it might seem.