I'm also in the boat that the meat mixers are not worth it.
Additionally like
indaswamp
, I use a good drill and a sheetrock mud mixer to mix meat in a rectantular cooler or a modified buck I rigged up.
To me a 12A corded drill (cant be a weak drill) and mixing 10-15 pounds in a cooler is the way to go. Its fast, easy, and clean up is literally hosing out and then soaping and rinsing a cooler. If you are lazy u can go to a manual car wash and just wash coolers out with the spray guns. I do this after processing 3 coolers worth of game animals.
Now if there is concerns about the meat being too thick, simply mix up the batches in 10 pound increments. This is easy. You just mix up your seasoning and cure with some water to measure for 10 pounds of sausage then toss the meat and mix in the cooler and in less than 3 min or so everything is heavily mixed. You scoop it all out and thrown in the next 10 pounds and mix. Super simple.
If you switch sausage types a simple wipedown with wet paper towels or a hose rinse out in the yard/driveway gets it more than good enough to throw in a different type of sausage and mix.
Using this approach I can mix 100 pounds of sausage 3x faster than what it takes to clean one of those hand crank mixers which cant even hold 20lbs if it claims 20lb capacity.
Anyhow, I hope this info helps :)