AAARGH!!!
How did I miss this thread?!? I'm the runner-up for the lifetime "biggest road disk hater" award
Short answer: ditch the pizza cutters, get yourself some real brakes.
Long answer: the road disk brakes have driven me to the insanity of retro-modding a 1950s French randonneuse just so that I can have rim brakes on a steel "gravel" bike frame.
Thought #1: I've run cheapo cable-operated MTB brakes with various V-brake levers without any serious issues whatsoever for years. You do get disk rub, and you do need to spend an hour or two setting them up, but even as I type this, my Mrs is cycling on her hybrid with a 20-year old Hayes MX1 caliper that's still working well despite two decades of abuse. [Update: she's back home safe and sound without any brake failures]. They work with cheap cables, cheap pads and noname levers. They work.
Thought #2: I've tried BB7 road, BB7 MTB, Spyre road, Spyre MTB and a fistful of cheap Chinese hydro-cable hybrid jobbies. Tried them with Micronew levers. Tried them with Campies. Tried old school non-aero dia-compes. Tried the Tektro "long-pull" jobbies that are close to unusable. Tried them on 3 different framesets. Tried different pads.
The brakes never worked well.
After long hours of fannying with the set-up I did manage to get barely acceptable results from BB7 Road+Micronews... But this only lasted for a few months until the pads were worn. And I couldn't make them work with new pads, despite hours of tweaking.
Similarly, I've managed to get a semi-acceptable response from Spyre Road + Micronews. This lasted for several months until I suffered a catastrophic brake failure during an emergency stop
. Out of the blue the pads just wouldn't bite at all. Never managed to set up the brakes to work well after that.