Unless you're a serious baker/pastry chef you'll do fine with a gas oven and you're right, the broiler is a lot better in a gas oven. Personally, from all I've read over the years, I'd stay away from Viking. At the high end consider Capital, Wolf, DCS, but you need to decide whether the premium for one of these ranges is worth it over something less expensive. Bosch would be a good choice there.

I'm not sure what you mean by "will all gas make cooking difficult". Is that something one of the sales people told you? There are things that bake better in an electric oven and things that bake better in a gas oven. Mostly meats and roasts do better in a gas oven due to higher moisture while pastry and such are easier with electric. Frankly, it's all personal preference. My wife does the baking in our house and she hated our last oven mainly because it was electric. She had always used gas until then and was more comfortable with it. She still baked some wonderful stuff but she was just frustrated by having to adjust her baking style to the oven. IMHO, given the quality of most gas ovens today, you will probably not have issues of temperature control and excessive cycling with either gas or electric. The main reason sales people tend to push dual fuel is that there is a premium in price and there has been lots of marketing around the "advantages" of dual fuel. I would suggest that you don't discount all gas unless you are dead set on getting an electric oven. Some brands, other than Wolf and Viking, to look at are Capital and Bluestar. Both offer a fully open burner range that will perform better than either Wolf or Viking IMHO. If you really want an electric oven, you should consider a range top with open burners and a separate wall oven. Now if you're really set on Wolf or Viking, I personally prefer Wolf over Viking after cooking on both. Finally, if you do look into other brands, do a search on "Culinarian" which is the new Capital open burner range. For Bluestar, just search "bluestar" and you'll get more threads then you know what to do with. For Bluestar, there have been complaints about the oven door sticking so read up on that and make up your own decision on whether their "V1" range has it fixed. Good Luck.

I have a range (NXR 30") that uses the exact same burners as the Wolf. I personally have no problems at all with it, but then again the smallest pot I own is 10", everything else is 11"-14" including the Wok. Plus a large 14X24" Steel Griddle. So I don't have any problem with the larger diameter of the burners and I love having all burners the same where I can have all 4 full blast at 15,000BTU or all 4 at super low simmer and everything in between. As for not being able to "Simmer a pot of sauce" with the Wolf burners that is complete nonsense. I am right now as I type simmering a LARGE pot of Sketti sauce on high simmer. It is in a Swiss Diamond 8 1/2 Qt pot and its at least 2/3rds full. But there is a high simmer and a low simmer. The super low simmer is obviously not for doing a very large pot of sauce, its meant for doing something like keeping mash potatoes warm, or holding an emulsion like hollandaise or a beurre blanc, or melting chocolate and it does so perfectly. That is what is so sweet about these burners is the ability of that super low (melt chocolate on a paper plate low flame)plus the slightly higher simmer that is for large pots of sauce. The high simmer as you can tell works just fine, in fact perfect for simmering a LARGE pot of sauce all day. You can see at least 3 sauce volcanoes coming up in my sauce here, (although a couple are just bubbles that might be hard to make out unless you know where to look) simmers perfectly, any more and it would burn. (Just ran back down to stir it and taste and had 4 bubbling volcanoes going) So obviously Consumer Reports is clueless in that respect. If you have and prefer to use tiny pots then yes you should get something like a Capital Culinarian as those burners would fit you small pot needs better. This is the high simmer with about 5Qts of sketti sauce simmering away just fine right now.

If you are thinking about a Viking Gas Range, my advice based on over ten years of living with this disastrous piece of appliance engineering is to avoid it like the plague. Everything that can go wrong with a range has happened to mine: electronic igniters (replaced numerous times), oven gas manifolds (burned up and replaced), door seal (failed), door hinges (sprung), racks poorly designed and don't fit, difficult to clean,... The temperature controls for the oven are extremely approximate and the distribution of heat is completely spotty, even with the "convection" fan on: the internal oven temp can very by more than 100 F. from one side to the other if you are set at 350 F. I bought the Viking from a dealer because of the price, but due to the repairs and maintenance, which a lot I did myself, there was no bargain in retrospect. The more work I have done on it, the more I realized how poorly engineered it was. Being an active cook, I have had two Wolf and two Garland ranges (which were fabulous and which I sold along with the houses they were in), otherwise I would not be complaining on a public site. Good luck.