Never smelled anything with the Keystone or Fireview.
Ditto, I like having manual control. One of us is usually around to open up the air on the coals and get more heat, if it's really cold out. In average outside temps, with cat stoves I've run, room temp doesn't vary more that a couple degrees over the entire burn. Manual control was part of the reason I went with the old version of the T5 without the EBT2. I'm not convinced I made the right choice, however. Of course, I could tweak the old style T5 to totally manually control the secondary, but I'm obviously not going to do that to my SIL's stove. If the stove were mine, maybe I could come up with a way to have the secondary operate in stock mode, yet override it if I wanted to.
OTOH, if we were gone for long work days, I think a thermostat would be good for automatically opening the air on the coal bed at the end of the burn.
The T5 has a big front door. The door gasket seals flat against the front wall of the box, as you can see in the first load pic in my thread. The Buck 91 did the same, with a big front door. I think that might provide a better seal than a knife-edge...or I could be full of crap again.
Never any smoke smell with either of those stoves, and I was running the T5 when it was 60* outside. However, the stove draws unbelievably, and I could still open the door with no smoke roll-out.
I got better at starting new loads with a minimum of hassle, using good kindling and a SuperCedar chunk or two. Weather you start a new load with kindling or you do it off coals, you still have to monitor the stove until it gets up to temp and you cut the air and/or close the bypass. But yeah, the small firebox you have is going to require more re-starts.
Ditto. The welded-seam steel box appeals to me, but soapstone sure looks nice...