Standing dead, great idea. I can only speak to life out West.
For western conifers, the needles should be gone, not red. Red is too wet to burn without a summers drying. A spruce with no needles has been dead at least two seasons and is pretty dry. This when the 'frost cracks' show up. Red will typically not be dry enough to have split. Couple more seasons and the bark starts to fall off.
Standing silver, a conifer with most of it's bark gone can be burned same season, harvested before heavy rains of Fall. If it is still standing, it is usually sound/solid enough to have some heat still in it. Wood from downed trees, even standing dead seems to lose it's heat value as it ages. The spruce around here, killed by the 2018 fire, does not give as much heat as it did five years ago. Lodgepole seems to fare better. My observations.
Horizontal trees collect water.
Don't let anyone tell you sheltered wood won't dry in the winter. In the mountains anyways. Cold air is dry air and the relative humidity from the weather channel doesn't tell you the whole story.
A very low dew point is very dry air. Water, even frozen, still moves away from high density. Frost inside the ice cream, dried out steaks. Your freezer tells you.
The water condensing on the metal roof of my woodshed over the wood pile, says the same thing. Slows way down maybe, needs air circulation, but still dries.
Trees killed by disease, or that have been injured tend to hold pitch. Dry pitch wood helps wetter wood burn, I hoard it and mix it when necessary.
My boot/mud room is a glazed/enclosed S.W. facing porch. This is the first stop for wood coming in, and I keep three days of wood stocked, cross stacked and rotate it.
Conifer branches, the dead ones, close to the trunk, are very dense, easy to dry when necessary, and burn really well starting a fire. I see most folks cutting firewood discard them, then split the lengths they worked so hard to bring home into 'kindling' to replace the stuff they threw away out back. I keep a weeks supply in a perforated bucket next to the stove. Very dry.
A 36V Makita battery chainsaw really shines filling buckets with branches while firewooding.
I make shreds for firestarter by splitting/ripping large diameter spruce rounds with a sharp chainsaw. If I am cutting dead wood, these shreds dry fairly quickly in perforated buckets in the boot room. Kept near the woodstove, they can really help with slow starts. When my mill is processing dryer wood, there is another source. Take a couple bricks, elevate an old black canning pot off of the surface of a slow woodstove, fill it with wet shreds/branches and dry them if you are hard up.
The evaporative stage is the first part of the burn, needs a good draft. So, some dry wood. Air, but not too much. Outside air cools the burn, you are already fighting water cooling your fire. Tough balance.
I stacked two pallets, and on this cross stacked some wood I split down a little smaller, about half cord. Large tree I intended to mill, had started to go off and was holding water.
I set the pallets in the sun against the woodshed, and cut a used length of greenhouse poly just wider than the pallet. Covered front, back, and top, left the sides open to allow air cross flow. Sloped top of woodstack towards the front. It worked. The water condensed on the inside of the poly and ran down. In a fall's worth of drying, is dry enough to speed dry by the woodstove and go into the mix. Not perfect, like good wood, but proved a point.
Our house is pretty snug, 600s.f. main floor. If I listened to the terror parrots, I'd have no heat. The Fisher woodstove is about 18in from a wood finished wall corner. A bent piece of sheetmetal serves as the wall's heat shield. A partial piece of stove pipe is fashioned into a standoff heatshield for the single wall downstairs chimney.
Fortunately the original builder put the chimney in the middle of the house. We harvest more heat, and those pesky -30s/40'sF don't kill the draw the way they can with short sighted exterior wall placement, or a 'good enough' uninsulated short stack. Those chimney clearance numbers in the code exist for a reason. Ask my neighbor. His woodstove can snuff itself out at -25F or so. He burns damp wood with an uninsulated exterior chimney.
I premelt snow for water sometimes in buckets by the stove before dumping into canning pots on top of the stove. A hand on the side of the plastic will tell me when things are too hot. I've only softened one bucket.
I stock wood to burn in a space behind the woodstove, next to the gas range. If I feel the need to really dry wood, like the stuff coming off of that pallet, I stand it about 12 inches away and turn it. The lovely smell of pitch heating tells me If I have it too close or the fire too hot.
If you can't tell me the surface temperature of my woodstove on a heating run, ( I keep it less than 500F ), the air temperature 12 inches away, or the surface temperature of the wall, than how can you presume to tell me anything?
I bank a winter fire at night, but not a choked down, early burn, with substandard wood. By an hour or so before bed, I have a good bed of coals/black wood simmering. At this stage, no real extra air is needed. The heat is doing all the work, providing the oxygen. Those little blue flames dancing on top, tell you so.
I chunk in one or two good, large pieces, make sure there is air gap between, and let it rip for a few minutes, to get the heat way up. I close the flue just until the draw slows, then close the dampers in.
I get up by 0430 or so, and if I did it right, there is enough heat in the bottom of the box to easily get it all going again on the coldest mornings. I won't pretend it is a rocket/masonry anything for efficiency, clean burning, or heat storage, but it is a beast for heat, cooking, and water production/heating. I burn decent fires and good wood. I won't be made to feel bad.
We don't ignore our fire and are cautious about everything when we button things up at night or when we leave the house.
The 'rules' cater to/take care of the lowest common intelligence denominator. The only really danger in wood heat is the operator.
