Moose

my main takeaways from looking for a surgeon (for vaginoplasty in my case, but hopefully some of this carries over):

• when I was looking around for recs/reviews from online strangers, it seemed like basically every surgeon had someone who was super happy with their results, and someone with a horror story. it mostly just ramped up my anxiety about the whole process without really helping me make a decision. the thing that helped me the most was talking to specific people I knew who'd gotten the same surgery I wanted, and finding out who they'd gone to and how it went for them. I talked to three friends/partners who'd all gone to the same local surgical team and were largely happy with the results. that team had kinda meh reviews on the trans subreddits/etc, but from having those conversations with people in my life and asking about specific things I was most concerned about (for instance, I didn't care much about having "cis-looking" vulva, but I cared a whole lot about sensation and sexual function; everyone's got different priorities), I felt about as confident in my prospects as I ever really could've been. so I went with that team, and I'm quite happy with the results.
• going through recovery made me extremely glad I'd picked a local surgeon. it's almost certainly not as rough for orchi compared to vaginoplasty, but if i hadn't had a bunch of friends around to visit me in hospital, and if i'd had to deal with interstate travel on top of everything else, it just felt like that would've made everything way worse.

good luck with your search!