NYT Connections definitely has less red herrings than Only Connect's wall (and doesn't have the pressure of the timer, either...), but the quality has gone up significantly in the past year and half.

If anyone wants to try, I actually built a command line player of the NYT Connections game here: https://github.com/jleclanche/connections-tui (for some definition of the word "I") -- you can jump by date and easily compare.