Thanks. We hadn't thought of vacuum drying but that would be interesting. Rather than speeding it up, we have been thinking "slow it down" thinking that an annealing stage might relieve stresses. I built a classic solar kiln about 15 years back and it worked extremely well with 8/4 Soft Maple.
There are obviously numerous outfits drying 12/4 Oak and Ash for baseball bats and some drying other woods for large table legs, though many of the latter are laminated up. The problem with Oak is the roughness and pores, We need something fine grained, heavier than Basswood, and easy to dry. Pine would be good except our market just doesn't like the word, "pine." Poplar might work except a lot of the color of off-putting.
As I said earlier, forty or fifty years ago, local builders used a great deal of Silver maple for plantings around housing and construction projects and these mature trees are the bread and butter for tree cutters around here so there are lots of free logs.
Defecting is not a problem as we are mostly making short lengths; long splits or checking on the other hand are a distinct problem. Nothing for it but to give it a try, I guess.