Alright... I followed Arron Franklin's recipe for ribs, to the letter.
Franklin's recipe calls for wrapping the ribs tightly in foil after 3-hours. Also, he sauces his ribs with thinned sauce in the wrap (whatever one prefers - I used KC Masterpiece hickory cut 50/50 with water), and then returns the ribs to the cooker for 2-additional hours. He also calls for smoking the ribs at 275 to 300-degrees, all of which I did.
The ribs came out way over-cooked, and I will never sauce ribs in foil again as the sauce burned. While the ribs were, in fact, overcooked, they would not have burned and would have been edible without the sauce.
The fire/smoke was
much easier to manage with the stack extension (recall I still have the factory baffle in place), and I used much less wood (one stick approximately every 40-minutes ~). The temperatures indicated on the thermometers were perfect, as was the smoke - most perfect smoke so far, in fact,
HOWEVER, as the fellow in this video experienced:
Old Country chimney extension the left side of the cook chamber got noticeably hotter with the 24" extension - thus the overcooked ribs - and the YouTube guy shortened his stack extension to compensate (I will be adding another Tel-True thermometer on the left side of the cook chamber). The 12" extension I had on order would take 2-weeks to get here so I cancelled the order - I will shorten my 24" extension to 12" and go from there.
I think the chimney extension is a worthwhile modification but for my cooker, it needs to be shorter. I will definitely save money on wood so for that alone it seems worth it to me.