Guilty.
And I had the same experience with Condar... When I contacted them about switching steel back to ceramic they offered to do it no questions asked, even cross shipped me a new one.
I have had all the problems you did except for the clogging. The first steel I struggled with I had stalls at startup, significant smoke when in the 800-1100F probe temp region, and occasional runaways to 1800+. It also warped badly.
Now I assumed the warping and smoke problems where just because it degraded over time due to my newbie abuse, and got a new one this year. Well only 3 months use on the new one (about 1 cord), and the problems persisted, but my wood and burning habits have improved significantly with experience vs the last one. I have also freshly rebuilt the stove so the refractory box, thermostats, gasket seals -everything is perfect. This time I started having the mid cycle stalls where it could be happily cruising at 1200F + probe temps for 2-3 hours and then just randomly drop to 800 and start belching like a smoke dragon for no rhyme or reason.
This is burning 2 and 3 year C/S/S and top covered wood that's mostly under 20%, some under 15%. All tested on a resplit. It doesn't hiss, lights very easy, easily reaches 500-600 stovetop temps, glass stays fairly clean.. it really is
not the wood in my case.
Pop the ceramic in, and bam. No more billowing smoke when under 1100, and so far no mid cycle stalls. Its too early to tell but I feel like its holding temps longer as well.
This actually is a case where the VC and Jotul designs differ (Jotul possibly the better idea). In the VC, the smoke enters the rear chamber through an iron hood just below the bypass, then immediately enters the refractory box and makes a 180 degree u-turn to flow down through the catalyst. then at the bottom of the refractory exits and makes another 180 to go up the back of the stove and out.
The cat element is only a couple inches from that inlet hood, so if we are not careful it is quite possible to get flame impingement with the VC design. It might be part of the reason they can be prone to over-fire when not operated very carefully.
View attachment 125531