No it's not, a skewer or a sharp thin knife is perfect, this over complication and black art that people preach on about is complete codswallop, I worked 1/2 a dozen restaurants whilst at college as a KP including a leading French restaurant and not one had a thermometer except for the fridge.
Sorry, but working to exacting temperatures isn't a black art - it's a science. Guessing is the black art here.
And with regard to your restaurant experience, you seem to have conveniently forgotten the hours spent in prep and the exacting standards that kitchens require from their ingredients as well as their staff - spend day in, day out cooking and you develop an intrinsic knowledge of how long it takes to cook something to the level required.
A typical kitchen doesn't have time for a chef to stand watching something cooking, there will be countless other tasks to perform and the time spent in prep ensuring that every single one of your steaks is cut to the same thickness means they don't have to keep watching the thing like a hawk, as your typical home cook would.
How have excellent chefs cooked for 100's of years without thermometers? they must all be wrong.
By carefully perfecting the art over years and years of practice; something that your average home cook, at least when it comes to cooking meat, doesn't have to worry about when they can rely on a Thermapen or similar to keep them out of trouble. Especially when cooking something they may only do once in a blue moon and have a significant amount of money invested in.
And while these 'excellent chefs' might not have employed the use of a thermometer, you can be equally sure that they didn't just cook something at the highest possible temperature for an arbitrary length of time and hope for the best.
How do you gauge a tough steak and think, do you know what it needs, some more heat to soften it up? a Thermometer won't tell you that.
By your logic, continuing to cook a 'tough' steak means you are heating it up further, which doesn't really make much sense as that would suggest you can soften a steak up by overcooking it.
But going along with your claims, neither a thermometer or your finger would tell you that it needs more heat - only experience would do that.
But at least the thermometer would tell you when you're about to overcook your steak and completely balls the whole thing up.
The only thing that is 'rubbish' was your earlier suggestion of how to cook the steak, which was to cookery what licking a finger and holding it up in the wind is to meteorology.
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