Presumably none of the recommended wax temps are going to burn your base
Not true. If you bring the base itself up to some of the higher temperatures (particularly those needed for harder waxes) your base will get worse at absorbing wax. The energy from the iron going into melting wax is fine. If you hold the iron in one place long enough more of that heat will raise the temp of the base itself, damaging the ptex. The total temp will be low enough that the wax won't smoke but the base can be damaged.
There's pretty much a YouTube video for any school of waxing theology you want. I just cringed watching the Glenn Plake tuning video. There's a bunch of folks here who worship at the DPS Phantom altar. There's people who believe in Universal wax. There's people who don't scrape. There's folks who only crayon on the wax. There's people who use metal brushes to remove wax and those of us who only use metal brushes before waxing to clean out the structure. You'll develop your own theories over time.
I come from nordic skiing, where at a recreational level and low-level racing waxing is
far more important than in alpine skiing at a similar level. There's also all sorts of nonsense there too. But I've learned from reading/watching what wax experts in that field do/say (Primoz here is one) and try to follow that. And try to be efficient. You can maybe get away with stuff in recreational lift-served skiing that would make skiing a complete chore on nordic skis.
Yes there are many approaches. More than one approach works. A few are actually destructive. Some waste time or product. Sometimes using more product is "safer" but more wasteful, so if using expensive product there's a tradeoff. I used to crayon on high-fluoro waxes to save money. Now I'm just putting it all in the trash
. If using cheap wax you can not worry about that.
Watch a good wax tech (who has to create many good skis in a hurry w/o harming them for paying customers) put wax on the skis - if you do it that way your skis will be good, your bases will be safe, and you won't waste time with nonsense.
Sure, there are other approaches to waxing that work fine, so do what you like (within reason) and don't overstress the details. For example, I think I'm going to try this fiberlene approach to reduce scraping because of the mess. Maybe more paste/liquid waxes too.
But if you're new, you can't go wrong by following what
KingGrump wrote on Thursday. Or, for some of the "easy" waxes (like recreational liquids), just follow the manufacturers' recommendations.