New to heating with a wood stove and have some questions

Hi all! My wife and I recently purchased a log home that comes equipped with a Dutchwest 2462. I feel like I'm getting the hang of it pretty well but have a few questions that I'm hoping you all can help me with. First off I'm following the directions in the manual with some minor tweaking mostly when it comes to starting a fire. I am able to get a good 6-8 hours of heating on a 6 log burn maintaining 350-550 degrees registering on the side door and 800-1200 degrees on the catalyst probe when the catalyst heat is engaged. So here are my questions/concerns:
1.) Even at the temperatures that I have listed above, I am having difficulty maintaining a flame once i close the damper and engage the catalyst. This causes me to constantly tinker with the primary and secondary heat controls to keep a flame going but for the most part it's a weak flame instead of a dancing lively fire as the manual states is necessary to maintain. It flames right up if I open the damper and then dies out again when I close it. Am I doing something wrong or is this normal? Smoke only comes out of the chimney when starting a fresh fore or reloading and getting a new one going.
2.) My manual states that No part of the stove should ever glow but the baffle and the collar around the baffle that lead up to the catalyst will glow for a little while when the stove is really cranking. It's not simply a reflection it's an obvious glow so I am concerned with overfiring but like I said I don't ever bring the temperatures over 550-600 on side door and 1200 on catalyst probe.
3.) Last question I promise! So today I had a good fire going, 500 side door, 1100 catalyst and running both primary and secondary controls on low with damper closed and a very tiny flame if any at all when the stove started to rumble for a little bit and the baffle in a red hot glow. Next thing I know a whumph sounded and a puff of smoke blew out of the primary air control opening and the inside of the stove flamed up. The rumbling immediately stopped and after a few minutes the flames died back down and the baffle lost its glow. What the heck happened there?!

It's pretty dry, Not as dry as it could be to be efficient but not wet enough to hiss and crackle. For question 3 is that what backpuffing is? The rumbling is what really weirded me out.

That sounds like what happened to me, thanks for the info!

Hey again! So i am still having problems getting any sort of flame when I build a large fire in this stove. After opening the damper and reloading 6 logs onto a hot bed of coals I let the moisture burn off the logs for 10-15 minutes and got a good raging fire going to bring side door temp to 500 and probe temp was also at 500. Then I closed the damper and opened secondary(catalyst) heat control 2 turns for a high fire and left primary control fully open. Box has been steady at around 425-450 and catalyst is sitting at 1100 but there are no flames that I can see. I'm afraid that this is causing the problem of too much smoke building up in the box and getting a puff of smoke shooting out of the primary control as I mentioned earlier and has happened a couple times so far today. This is als worrying me as far as building up creosote. Frankly im dumbfounded and don't know what to do. Any info on how to better utilize the primary and secondary air controls while in catalyst mode would be great. Or if it sounds like I'm doing something wrong reloading please let me know. This is our primary heat source and I really need to get this figured out because it gets too awfully cold. Thanks for reading!

Thanks I will do that on my next load, man this thing can be frusterating!