I think you were benefiting from the "de-stratification" effect I first mentioned. Most of the heat from a convector goes upwards - and tends to stay there (there can be a 5C+ difference in our sitting room between floor height and ceiling height) - stirring it up a bit does help (probably disproportionately if you study the psycho/phsyiological benefits of warmer feet!).
PS I read that some parts of the US mandate catalytic converters in flues to try and mitigate the air pollution (from burning conifers perhaps, or maybe from using inefficient, poorly designed stoves without airbricks!)
stove regs vary state by state. Our stove was a simple slow movement low-stack-temp stove. 70s technology. Most of the EPA approved stoves now have a secondary burn element and introduced air at the top of the firebox before allowing exhaust out. Gas is so cheap here (and I'm in a different type of area now - was rural, now suburban) that it's uncommon to smell a wood stove, even with 350 houses in the neighborhood. The neighborhood has a lot of woods area and 99% of the wood falls and rots. Our neighborhood association is begging people to bring their own chainsaws to the public land and take wood for free.
At any rate, pine isn't commonly burned in my area because wood like cherry and red oak grow quickly (especially red oaks and pin oaks), split easily and dry well. That's all we burned in our house, and when we removed the stove, the creosote in the chimney expanded due to the fireplace temp (the stove had been in a huge stone fireplace and we insulated above the stove, so there was never any real stack temp). Chimney fire resulted. I'm guessing the secondary combustion is desired first for air quality purposes, and second as a request from insurers.
But, we're out of the loop. Big stone hearth and a fireplace opening 5 feet wide describes what you mentioned about air movement earlier - the sides of the hearth would heat up, but the stove was trapped against the wall and it would do its job. It did its job better with the fan forcing new air to come in and sending warm air out. It was also on the opposite end of the room vs. the seating area - large room around 30 feet long - just not well set up to broadcast the heat out and the house originally had two more woodstoves installed, so likely never intended for that spot to supply heat to the house .
Ag extension here (university outposts) tells people not to burn any softwoods known to be pitchy or sappy, though my understanding is that the person who wants to do it can just run stack temp way up for half an hour or so a day and the chimney will remain dry and safe. My dad is so stingy, he never would've "wasted" the heat going up the chimney, thus we ended up with the fire department solution instead. We burned almost exclusively red oak, with walnut, cherry or locust once in a while. usually no bark (we either split it off or if we bought wood, it was from a relative who send wood with bark to "people in town who won't care")
Our stove wasn't an insert, though - it was a long-log stove - half stuck out of the fireplace, half in. About 36 inches long and would burn wood about 32 at the max. The selling point for a stove like that was that you could load it every 8 hours and still heat a large area. Pull the ashes to the front, put in the next load and shut down the air flow.
