Fiber coupling

(For example, thorlabs recommends either fiberports or nanostages for fiber in-coupling, but I've found fiberports to be impossible to work with and the nanostages to be super bulky, hard to work with, and don't often give me great coupling.)

Optical coupler

So far I am using these outcouplers, and am not having any luck getting better than 80-85% efficiency. (I've checked the output with a camera, confirmed the modes are collimated and are matched to eachother, and am sure that this is the limit for what I can achieve.)

Thorlabs collimator

What's the easiest (and ideally cheap) method of trying to consistently get better coupling efficiencies in fiber-to-fiber systems.