That's a lot of information to absorb ... I doubt I managed to even get 5%

The thread by Vortex seemed to relate mainly to the construction of masonry stoves. What I can take from his $10k build vs my 15 minute stack a few bricks to build a stove is that I need to insulate my burn chamber more (in addition to the riser). I can't put ceramic fibre blanket on the inside as the wood will just tear it apart. Perhaps I can first coat it with that mix of liquid glass and sand? Or just wrap the outside of the burn chamber with the ceramic blanket, and then stack more bricks to hide it.
But what I found interesting is that the wood pellets I chucked in were still there in shape but crumbled when touched as though they had just gasified.
The problem I have with such a small stove is the scaling. Such a small fire is dominated at present by the size of the fire bricks I'm using. And when I start adding 1" insulation inside, I'm significantly dropping the CSA.
What I was originally planning to do was encase the sides in sheets of Ytong to try and create a nice outdoor box stove. Ytong is insulative, and I've seen people drill holes into it to make a temporary rocket stove. But now I'm getting all sorts of odd shapes sticking out of my basic box
PS: The riser is 18 inches tall which is two 9 inch bricks. I believe I have seen figures of 16-24 inches being found to be satisfactory.