When Newton is good, it's very good; when it's bad, it's awful.
I remember both of us had a discussion here a few years back. And your analysis was spot on. The problem was NR had issues with humped yield curves and vol > 60%. So I tried NR for a few trials and then switched to a bracketing (bisection) method. But I decided to bracket the seed first to error ~ 10^-1 and then go into 5th gear to NR.
I used Brent minimizer (not root finder version!) by converting f(x) = 0 to an optmization problem.
One open issue in this thread is to quantify what is meant by deep OTM, ITM. Most methods break when S = 100, K = 150.