Well, one mention of “the time of year to service a lot of ovens” to an appliance repair person who was fixing my washer or maybe it was my dryer, years ago, he’d gone off on such a limb on the ovens breaking down that worked because of self-cleaning on what was mainly touch-control systems caused me to be unable to get a word in edge-wise of how I use mine much more wisely, in that a standard 3-hour cleaning the default is set for or going down to the 2-hour cleaning and doing mine a bit more frequently makes my oven work a bit more trouble free, and I think even with the lack of scraping a few food particles and/or cleaning up whatever ash afterwards, my oven is cleaned satisfactorily...
As for the smell, I enjoy the scent of the cleaning being done, just hope that it’s not similar to that of cremating human remains...
— Dave