Hybrid wood + gas pizza oven does starting with gas and finishing with wood actu...

Looking at hybrid ovens where you start with gas to heat up faster, then add wood for flavor. Does the gas assist actually save meaningful time getting to 700°F+? And once wood's added, do you still get real wood-fired flavor, or does the gas mute it? Curious if anyone's used one long-term vs just wood-only.

Does the gas assist actually save meaningful time getting to 700°F+?

Absolutely. For one thing, a hardwood fire takes kind of a while to build up; but actually, much of the time saved is instead a matter of construction. Conventional wood-fired ovens are built to have a monumentally large thermal mass so that they can cook bread with the retained heat (the fire having been removed before baking begins). An oven designed to be continuously heated by a gas flame doesn't need that, so lower thermal mass and a quicker temperature rise.

do you still get real wood-fired flavor

Hm. A properly functioning wood-fired pizza oven pulls clean air in from the front, over the oven floor and then over the burning logs in the back; the heated air, along with the combustion products, then sweeps upwards, forwards over the arch of the oven, and out the chimney. The smoke is never really in contact with the pizza, and pizzas from a wood-fired oven don't really have a wood-smoke taste; they are cooked by the conductive heat of the oven floor and the radiant heat of the oven dome, not by the convective heat of the smoke. Any smoky character in the pizza comes from the pyrolysis of the food itself.

So yes, you still get "wood-fired flavor", but in a vacuous sense: wood-fired pizza is not flavored with wood smoke. In that sense, the "hybrid" thing is a gimmick.