Respectfully disagree about the "lids" issue.....
Look at the stove at the top of this page. Note that the "burners" or holes are spread all over the cooking surface. And there are usually two right over the firebox as well. My wife and I cooked for over 15 years on a Monarch that looked a lot like the one pictured.
We DID use the open burners many times. Example, you have one skillet on the cooler side simmering something while boiling water for canning on a open burner. Why else would they put up to 6 of these removeable lids (different sizes for different pans) on a cook surface.
I grew up with many neighbors using wood cook stoves and ALL of them used open burners with direct flames or heat contacting the fry pans, etc. when they wanted fast heat.
Very often we had a copper boiler on top of the stove with two lids off so the maximum amount of heat could get to the bottom of it to keep the water boiling. They are removeable for a reason, and that reason is to allow maximum heat to get to the bottom of your skillets, boilers, etc.
A wood cookstove can be doing a whole bunch of things at once. Canning directly over the flame side, frying in the middle, while simmering on the cooler side. Bread rising in the warmer while baking in the oven. A pot of coffee warming off to the side, etc. Our monarch had two ornate drop down holders on the back of the stove that allowed you to put your pot of coffee off of the surface to just keep it warm. A wood stove allows you to do stuff you cannot do on a simple gas or electric stove. These "holes" have a reason to be there otherwise a single flat surface would suffice. We often did feed the stove from the top using the lids directly over the fire box. We also opened those lids while the fire was just starting to get a big pot of coffee off to a quick start in the morning while the fire was building. Doing that made coffee lickity split. Waiting for the iron to warm up would have added many minutes to such a simple task. The old timers taught us to not worry about a little carbon on the bottom of our utensils. Just wipe them off with water and hang them on hooks beside the stove. Dozens of my neighbors did this so I think those holes are there to be used as I have mentioned.
My wife loved the woodstove in the winter. However....summer was another story.
So long as I kept her in fine split maple with some super dry cedar kindling, she could get a pot of coffee perking as fast as you could with a gas stove.