That's right, manly burners, not kids with training-wheels thermostat stoves!
I don't see much difference between running a stone stove, or a stove with steel sheets inside the box, preventing the heat from getting out.
I don't think I'm sending all that much heat up the flue once the stone is warm. That load in the pic, that I'm burning now, has the air set at 1 on a scale of 4, and the flue meter is reading right at 300. That's a meter lying on top of the stainless tee snout, about 6" behind the rear flue exit. Gotta be hotter there than it would 18" up a vertical connector pipe, I think.
It would be interesting to see what a probe at 12-18" up the liner would read. I'd need a thermocouple for that. I may do that some day, and hook one up for the cat exhaust as well. The hole provided on the back of the stove requires an 8" probe, and that's too long to accurately transfer actual cat temps all the way to the dial. Or I could drill a hole in the top of the stove and drop in a shorter probe over the cat, as Todd did..