about to pull the trigger on a BK princess...some concerns

You will be fine.
When new the stove top will be 250 or a little higher when the cat is about to light off..about 500 inside at the cat.
You don't have to rush right up to those temps but it seems most do..I tend to that on my king.
Anyways temps inside your flue up high once or twice day won't hurt anything .

When you say damper do you mean by-pass?

BTW..you would just about have to double the temps to get a tube burner to light off compared to a cat stove.

time to engage the cat depends on how/when you load the stove I usually burn down pretty far before loading (it just seems easier not as likely to burn myself easier to stuff the princess full)I dont use a thermometer on the pipe instead just the cat probe but these stoves are really user friendly easy to control heat and as you have probably read they burn forever

As a new Cat owner all I can say is go for it. I was trying to get a BK or a Buck. Ended up with Buck cause BKs are rare here.

If you do your part (meaning, don't forget about it with the bypass open and the door cracked, or something else silly), you'll never lose control of that Princess. After a couple of days, you'll realize your concerns were for nothing, and wonder why you didn't buy it sooner.

I keep a pair of welder gloves near my stove LOL.

Properly seasoned wood, and a chimney that drafts good and you won't have any concerns.

I monitor flue temps because it's fun and easy and I'm a dork. I use a condar probe meter 18" above the stove in my double wall pipe. My old non-cat would daily run well over 1000 degrees and often bump 1250, when damped down fully it would cruise near 800. That flue was hot because non-cats dump tons of heat and enrgy into the flue in the name of getting a clean burn and for a pretty fire show I guess. Since running the princess, my probe meter has only been to 600 once or twice during warm up and the huge majority of the time sits at 400.

Those are internal temps so using your surface meter on single wall pipe you will get temps of 50%. So yes, 200 degrees on the outside of that pipe most of the time. You can put your hand on it. Cat stoves don't dump heat up the flue to lower emissions.

From cool stove with nearly no coals to cat engagement only takes a short time, maybe 30 minutes, and the whole warm up and start cruising process happens within an hour. The BK is not fast to warm up from cold, flue temps slowly climb in a dependable and predictable manner.

It is not a stove that you need to even think about running away from you. It does what you want it to when you tell it to. That's a cat advantage.

Very accurate Highbeam. My Cat stove runs around 200 degrees on wall of single walled pipe.