I am probably going to go the silicon blanket route at some point, and that changes a lot of other factors as well. I use either the original fox or my commercial pipe bender. The thing about kiln drying is that it hardens, or sets the lignin, which is supposed to be relatively irreversible. I have this from Michael Fortune who wrote one of the books, and designs studio furniture from large companies. My only suspicion is that in the commercial setting, you wouldn't kiln dry the wood, then steam it, if you could avoid it. Often the first step in kiln drying is steaming the wood. Steam rapidly drives out the water, and does not cause checking. So why would on not just go strait on to bending it. Often a myth that something can't be done is just people observing how it was done. But Fortune is way more technical than that.

I guess the other thing is that on the internet, almost nothing that one says can't be done turns out to be true, there is always someone, it seems, who has done it. That certainly applies to metalworking which is one of the few US crafts where there are multiple unions or crafts that share the same space. What these people believe is possible almost always refers back to the limitations of their own craft, and what they may have heard around the water cooler, but didn't understand. So there is almost always someone who did the opposite, and the internet is great at getting that out.