Dan
Having patented a drying process used in mills West of you for decades... and having a little more experience consulting on dry kilns for many times more board feet of hardwood than you have seen... You have some glaring gaps in your understanding of stock woods.
I have a number of sticks of walnut right here at the house which birch plywood cannot touch for strength, stability, toughness, hardness, nor especially, pretty.
But they never saw the inside of a kiln. Kilns do not make better wood, ever. They make acceptable wood with an acceptable level of degrade. You can screw up wood air drying or kiln drying. Speeding it up in a kiln is guaranteed to ruin some of it. Your comment on the difficulties in drying larch get right to the heart of the issue.
If laminates weigh less than walnut they have little advantage over typical kiln-dried factory walnut. Laminates usually weigh more than solid walnut because they are impregnated with a lot of glue during laminating. Glue prevents the exchange of water in use as the pores are already filled with plastic...
If I am going to use something as ugly as laminate I would rather go all the way and use a frigging plastic stock. Laminates make mopeds look cool...
art
