Your thoughts on pouring direct from Lee style pot or dipping with ladle? Pro's / Con's ? I've been pouring direct from my Lee pot but noticed a post about favorite style ladle and thought I'd ask.

I'm a ladle man. I think that's both a pro and a con.

yes- bottom pour Lee pot. I keep the level pretty close and let molten lead get back up to temp after adding before resuming, just curious about pot-ladle-mold temps cooling down ? Probably over thinking it but looking for opinions.

If you’re pouring bullets 250 grain or lighter so long as you can keep the temperature even as you empty the bottom pour it works fine. 
When you get to making match grade bullet 400 grains andd heavier ladle will result in much more uniform bullets

I've used a bottom pour 20 lb. Lee for decades, and had very little deviation in weighed bullets. I do have a PID controller, and stop every so often to sort bullets and sprues and add lead to keep my pot above half full all the time. 
Since I weigh all my bullets used in shooting long range that are heavier, if there was a problem any out of tolerance go back in the pot. And bottom pour is so much handier.

My bullets are cast from a bottom pour ladle.

I follow a couple protocols with bottom pouring and my results are very satisfactorily consistent:

1. Uniform temperature. 
2. Uniform level in pot. I make up my alloys in fairly big batches in advance and add ingots to the pot to keep it well over half full. When the level goes below that and I've run out of ingots I segregate those bullets from the rest of the prison population and reckon on getting more than a few culls weight-wise. Speed of operation outweighs the higher reject rate - the culls go back into the pot the next time anyway.
3. I too like a relatively loose sprue plate (and am re-thinking sprue plates in general due to a recent article in the Journal).
4. I hold the mold tight to the spout before starting the flow and keep it there for a one-two count then drop the mold away without stopping the flow until a large puddle piles up. Admittedly a bit tricky with multi-cavity molds, but practice makes perfect.
5. Cadence is critical, and not uniform with me depending on alloy, temp, cavity size, mold block material and physical size, etc. Since I employ a wide variety of all of the above and I'm kinda forgetful, more often than not I have to re-invent the wheel in that regard as I switch around. But, the bit about holding of the mold against the spout for a one-two count is the key to success universally with all my molds.

Using a 20+ pound furnace versus a 10 pound capacity furnace is a big help too in my experience. I had issues with my 20# RCBS and had fallen back on my tried-and-true ancient 10# Lyman and bullet consistency slipped a bit. Rejuvenated the RCBS and all is right with the world again. (Note: build up of "schmeck" in the nozzle effects flow rate/consistency and is a bugger to keep clean but a bigger bugger to clean out if ignored - a lesson I learned the hard way. That alone may represent the biggest gremlin in the process.)

I can't imagine going back to ladle pouring even though it was my SOP for decades.

My experience is both become almost an art form, the secret is how you use the pot. The rhythm of casting is very important for even bullet weight. The bottom pour pot uses a steady stream just beyond dribbling. The ladle is filled with a three second count carefully lifting the ladle  to assure an uniform sprue covering.   

The common attribute is uniform pot temperature using a PID controller. I am now using three pots, two for ladle and one bottom pour. The bottom-pour pot contains semi-hard alloy for pistol bullets and the ladle pots contain hard alloy for gas check bullets (CBA competition) and 20:1 alloy for Schuetzen.