Have you considered doing a different hood (neither stainless nor matching the cabinets) to make it a focal point? In a small galley I'd go with the least obtrusive (match the cabinets, or stainless undercabinet). In a large open kitchen (i.e., in a great room or simliar) I'd go with the same thing. But in a large, squarer (vs. galley) kitchen, I'd use the hood to introduce a punch of color, even if it's a neutral like black (perhaps with stainless banding). Re cleaning the wood, it depends on how good your insert is and how ornate the wood is. Lots of appliques with high relief grapes and vines, for instance, combined with a lot of billowy, greasy cooking (tossing wet food into hot oil for instance), so that the vapors escape the hood catchment, could be a real nightmare. A simple design, wtih less aggressive cooking, should be fine. As with all other cleaning, it helps if you attend to it early and often, rather than waiting until you can see the crud.

Do you think I should go with the 48" wide x 27" deep hood over the 36" range? That run of cabinets has a 24" wall oven tower on the right and the range to the left of center so the prep island is not so much a barrier island. I can control the length of the run by changing the opening from the kitchen to the keeping room. The plans have it as 12' into a 13.5' room. When I played around with it, I reduced the opening to 11' and the range fit nicely with a 42" hood. The cabinet maker reduced it even more by the way he shifted the range down while maintaining a 48" hood. I don't know if he realized it, but he shut the opening down to 8'-8" which is unsatisfactory. That is the one place in the house that we want a really open feeling. I'll work on it over the weekend & post a layout and some renderings. I did a quick look online & really like this corbel style if I could get it in the right proportions:

Patricia Colwell Consulting - There are typically two major clearances. 1st, the distance of any combustible materials directly above the cook top or stove. 2nd the clearance to combustible materials directly to the left and right side of the stove or cook top if they are below a certain height, such as cabinets to the counter top or the type of situation that the OP has. As mentioned these vary according to the stove or cook top. We just had one which was a Miele cook top, it also required that the left and right uppers be a minimum of 6" away from the left and right side of the cook top. The cook top was 36" which meant that the opening for the hood, distance between the left and right uppers, had to be at least 48", regardless of the hood being used.

>>>So, what do you suggest?<<< If that was directed to me, sorry, but I can't help on finding effective ductless hoods beyond pointing to the ARS thread as a resource for the OP. No help to you since, IIRC, you already knew about that thread from having recently participated in that discussion and I have no personal experience with the ARS units. My experience from when I have occasionally worked in kitchens with less expensive ductless units ( a Broan hood and several brands of OTRs) was that their undersized charcoal filters were mostly ineffective. IMO, those units well deserved the epithet of "forehead greasers" bestowed by one of the LBNL (Lawrence-Berkeley National Lab) reports that Opaone mentioned. ETA: As I think more about my previous ductless hood experiences, I'm thinking that most of them only had mesh filters and not charcoal filters except for the Broan model which had a rather weak fan and didn't seem to do much more than the OTRs. Maybe better than nothing, but not by much.