Corporate lawyers.

I'm impressed that somebody bothered to read all the safety warnings. There are so many warnings and cautions that run at such length in any appliance manual that the important ones get lost in the haze of verbiage.

I suspect that the reason for all that verbiage is an attempt to fend off the Dunning-Kruger Effect. (That is an actual technical term of social science art. It describes going beyond being too ignorant and/or too stupid to recognize your limitations while assuming a state of being so much smarter than others that you can do whatever you want.) Seems to me that, for the things that engineers can't come up with a way to stupid proof, then we get corporate lawyers trying to add written warnings against the all the specific kinds of stupid behavior they or engineers have heard of. The result is pages of verbal fog so dense and so long that you can't get most people (let alone the willfully stupid) to read them.

Now, for the specific question about whether, despite the safety instruction, you can manually light surface burners on the latest models of Bluestar ranges, you need to see whether or not the wiring diagram shows a safety valve wired onto the surface burners' gas line like that for the oven burners' glow-bar igniters. The wiring diagram does not seem readily available on-line but maybe some of the folks here with Bluestar RCS304BV2 ranges will help out by looking at the wiring diagram on the backs of their stoves. Or, Bongo, if the dealer showroom is convenient, maybe you can look at one on a stove at the showroom?

If the wiring diagram doesn't show such a safety interlock, I'm guessing that Prizer-Painter is only saying "don't" in the manual because (a) its engineers have not yet figured out an easy and economical way to retrofit an interlock and (b) the consumer products regulators have not yet seen a big enough need to require stupid-proofing hardware for this although (c) some people have complained about burns when they held very short paper matches over the top of a burner cranked all the way to max gas flow.

That may change if people start immolating themselves the way they did when they ignored Blue Star's manual's explicit statements to leave the convection fan off when broiling and/or before the bake burner ignited for preheating. IIRC, the reports of serious injuries to those who disregarded the instructions had risen to to fifty or sixty incidents when the US and Canadian consumer products agencies jointly issued the recall notice to Blue Star.

If I thought a functioning range during a power failure was critical for survival, I would wire the range to a power source that had an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) feeding it.

I don't know what the ac line power load is for the safety circuitry or igniters, but that should be listed somewhere and would determine the required capacity of the UPS along with some knowledge of power failure times in one's locale. Of course, the longer term UPS is not a modular blob from a computer store, but a motor-generator in the yard with a large fuel reservoir.

I have a 30" Bluestar that is 15ish years old and cooks like a champ. I can light the burners without electricity and they will work, only the top burners. If the flame goes out and you are not right there ti re-lite it the gas will just keep coming out the burners so my guess is they are just in CYA mode and do not want you to use the burners without re ignition safety system not operating.

We have a Wolf AG range (2008 model). We use the burners during power outages, lighting them with a match light stick lighter. Downside of an outage is not being able to use the range hood, nor the oven of course. But it’s very nice being able to use the burners to cook or reheat meals.

FYI:during a power outage, pizza reheats brilliantly in a cast iron skillet on top of a match-lit BS open burner !

When we purchased our RNB this winter, we explicitly asked if there was any electrical components in the gas valves and the answer from the dealer was no. And sure enough, when we had our first power outage a few weeks later, we lit the top burners manually no trouble at all. We kept the kitchen windows open and stayed nearby, of course. I confess I did not read that far into the manual.

I would choose a Capital Culinarian over a BlueStar any day! It’s all about the simmer for me.