This is a very interesting thread, one that I wish I was part of when it was unfolding. Still, there is a lot of contradictory info given, with most of the techniques being useful to forge technology, where the idea is to keep the heat inside to keep temps up in the forging range. The cook stoves mentioned, like the Rocket stove, are open stoves that work by getting the internal gases extremely hot so combustion is complete and greater efficiency is achieved. In these designs, you are actually cooking over the searing hot flue gases themselves, not with heat conducted through the stove surface and into the pan bottom. Sure, you want high internal temps in a wood-burning heating stove as well, but you also want to get the heat transferred out of the firebox and into the room, not up the flue.
There was no explanation here of the physics behind the ability for ceramic insulation to simultaneously raise internal temperatures and still transfer heat efficiently through itself to the stove walls. Temperature doesn't get transferred, heat gets transferred. All insulating materials work by slowing down the rate of heat transfer - period.
My wife's glass kiln uses electric resistance coils embedded into low K-value insulated firebrick, which serves as the interior lining of the chamber. Internal temps gets as high as 1400ºF, yet the steel jacket on the outside only gets a few hundred degrees, even if the stove kiln has been running all day at that temp. If heat was efficiently transferred through insulating firebrick, shell temps of her kiln would get even higher that stove temps, yet clearly, this is not the case.
There are other inaccuracies as well, such as the color white being IR reflective, and this is simply not true. White is reflective only is the visible range of the spectrum. Refractory coatings like ITC-100 don't dry pure white and they do a fine job of reflecting IR radiation. People often get these things confused because a black object gets hotter in sunlight than a white object, but that has to do with the enormous amount of visible light energy that sunlight carries. Black things look black because they don't reflect visible light. Don't assume this carries over into the infrared world. According to the first law of thermodynamics, energy is always conserved. If no visible light is reflected from a black surface, it must be absorbed. The energy from the light will be converted to heat energy and raise the temp of the material. It will then be emitted as IR radiation (or conducted into your hand, making it feel warm to the touch). That radiation will then strike other objects and change from radiant energy to heat energy. The actual color of these objects is irrelevant to their ability to absorb or emit this IR radiation. I'm not an engineer, so if any engineers or physicists here can show me I am wrong about this, I will gladly retract this statement.