Not all sherry cask whiskies are winners nor are all bourbon cask whiskies (assuming there's a suggestion here) are losers.
As for your reading of tasting notes and not finding any of the flavors suggested in the notes, I suggest they rarely are.
Most tasting notes are written by a marketing company which has been hired by a distillery or brand owner to promote their product, and subsequently written by someone who likely cannot tell a whisky from a warbler.
And if written by someone who does know a thing or two about whisky, they likely have their favorite descriptors which they use over and over. If you read enough of their notes, they tend to sound the same and are generally of little use to typify a particular whisky nor do justice to the variety and breadth of differences from distiller to distiller, whisky to whisky or expression to expression.
You probably get better information from this board about what a whisky is like than you'll get in reading most published tasting notes.
The whiskies you mentioned that you like leaves me thinking you should try Benromach 10 year. In it, you will get the peat and smoke influence you like in Bowmore but will also get the sweetish-side of the Balvenie as the Benromach 10 is aged in first fill sherry casks. They are also not marrying as many casks at a time as does Dalmore or Balvenie so it drinks closer to a single cask whisky than most official bottlings.
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