Welcome to the forum. Most 36" cooktops are 5 burners. Have you considered the Bluestar cooktop? It is a very powerful cooktop and is an open burner which cooks your food more effectively. I am getting a 30" cooktop. Homepro01

Wow, I can't believe no one has responded to your question. I'm probably the last person that should be responding since I have been asking similar questions myself. Not sure you still need the answer but I looked at both of these cooktops and counted out the Thermador pretty quickly, but we looked at so many, I can't remember specifically why. I narrowed my choices down to the Viking and the Wolf. Very long story short, we are getting the Wolf. We liked the look (a little designer, a little pro) as well as the simmer levels. We felt the reliability and known customer service were pluses with the Wolf as well. I think barring any service issues, we would have been happy with either, but their has been less complaints of issues coming from Wolf customers I'm excited to get it installed in a week or so!!

Thanks for the links. Those are interesting. The Wolf burner is a different design from those videos, but I don't know if it is now better or worse (although it does seem to address some of the complaints). I also don't know how different the cooktop burner on the bluestar is from the range burner shown in the video, but my hunch is they are the same. The idea of an open burner being more even has always made sense to me and appealed and the videos seem to confirm one's intuition on this. As for the Capital on the website mentioned above, they do have a rangetop, but I don't think they have a high end cooktop in gas which would work better for our current kitchen (although their rangetops would look better here than the rivals rangetops from what I can tell because it seems to be a little more slim). In any event, we don't have a Capital vendor here and so even if it were the best product (and it sounds like many feel it is) and it matched, service would be enough to scare me off probably based on where I live. Thanks again to everyone for your input! ps for Miele reliability, it is only one datapoint, but my mother in law's works hard and is like new. She is going to be appalled that we bought something else. (And given how nice hers is, I thought that would be the direction we'd go, but my wife surprised me by picking the Wolf and I felt like given that each one had strengths and weaknesses I felt like this was a good choice, but I also felt any of the three she'd picked I'd have been able to say that about).

I'm considering the Bosch, Wolf, but also now the Wolf rangetop. I'm concerned about the simmer burner so would love to hear any reviews on these.