Oh also there's this:

www.amazon.com/Ultimate-U...060-3812133

Many vegans rave over the recipes in this book.

Physical pain and mental pain are different things. You can make cheese without physically harming the animal, but you're still enslaving said animal and using it in an unnatural way. In addition, for a cow to continually produce milk it has to live a very unnatural life cycle of pretty much constant implantation and impregnation which leads to (1) mental pain (we can only imagine the cow is sad when the calf is taken and (2) physical pain (due to calcium depletion and other effects).

You could learn to speak cow-ese and ask the cow if it's cool with her :)

what I found that helps with these kind of products is to read the ingredients and then experiment with it on your own.
I personally love Sheeze, but what's particularly good about it is that it has very few ingredients...their cheeses tend to be very high in spirit vinegar, which gives it that distinctive "gag" flavour that you mentionned.

I like it, but then again back when I ate animal cheeses, I liked the "stinky" ones ;-)

So my advice to you since you don't like the big players in the vegan cheese world: When in doubt DIY!!! (Do It Yourself)
:-)

It's okay that you don't like what's available on the market, everyone has his or her own tastes.

here are my tentaive vegan cheese discoveries:
so...what I have discovered is to play with a combination of tofu, tahini sauce, cashew butter and nutritional yeast, to which you add white miso and apple cider vinegar. carageenan (irish moss) or agar powder will help to set it to make a cheese block.
Just play around witht he ingredients until you discover the perfect cheese for you.

also someone on one of the tribes that I belong to suggested using pickle juice instead of the vinegar. If you buy commercial pickles the "pickle juice" is pretty much vinegar, but if you buy real "live" pickles***, thepickle juice is really flavourvul, and that might help.

I love vegan cheese made with pickle juice, it gives it a fresh taste.

You have to remember that nature made milk and some humans figured out how to make cheese from it, by trial and error over 4 thousand years ago, and we don't knwo if the trial and error period lasted thousands of years :-)

vegans have only been making cheese for a few decades (not even!) so give the companies a break! we'll eventually figure it out, and as usual when we figure it out, the vegan product will be better than the non-vegan one...but it may take a few more years.
in the meantime I love sheeze, I like vegan gourmet and I even like "vegan" and the "parma!" vegan topping is delicious (and raw!)

but I do realize that all these are not perfect, so we need to be patient, and if what you want ain't out there, make it! :-)

*** to tell if pickles are "real" check the ingredients, if the ingredients are water, cucumbers, salt spices, you're good, if binegar is one of the ingredients, it is not a real pickle. Also the water should eb murky, and the jar kept in the frifge. If it's on the shelf it has been pasteurized and all the "live" culture is dead.