BeerBorg

Darn near every growler fill shop and brewery has had them around here for a year or two now, so I'm always surprised to hear when areas don't have them yet. Oskar Blues first developed the machine, and started selling them to other people in '14. Super convenient. Most places here charge the beer cost for a growler refill plus $1 (as opposed to maybe $5 for a new growler). Our local bottle shop also, when a keg is near kicked and they want to get something else up on tap, fills crowlers with what remains of the keg and sells them $1 or 2 cheaper, so you can always just quickly grab a crowler from the cooler cheap.
As to the leaking... yes, there are spotty reports of leaking. Cigar City stopped doing crowlers, for instance, because of the problem (not sure if they are back to doing them or not). I think the leaking mostly comes from the Oskar style machines, and other varieties haven't really shown this as a problem. I will personally say that the crowlers I get from Yazoo and Red Dog have never shown leakage, and I think they both have Oskar machines, so YMMV.

Nice timing....my first crowler was one that Swen sent to me about 2 years ago. Since then I've had 8-10 of them and never had an issue.

Sorry to hear about your troubles, John.