The two most popular styles of pizza, New York and Neapolitan, rely, to varying extents, on rapidly expanding steam created by intense heat. This rapidly expanding steam is what gives these styles their puff/volume. As you work at lower oven temps, and/or with materials that transfer heat slower (like ceramics or thin metal pans) your bake time increases and your puff suffers. Neapolitan dough utilizes an unmalted flour that resists browning. In an oven setup that bakes longer than 2 minutes, it takes on a hard, stale character that's a shell of it's faster baked potential. Now, there are a LOT of home pizza makers who've never had properly baked Neapolitan pizza who torture their doughs (and their guests) with these long baked nightmares- and who seem perfectly happy, but, if you're truly striving for the best possible results, you really want an oven that will char/leopard 00 flour in 90 seconds or less.
New York isn't that cut and dry. New York uses malted flour, which encourages browning, and it almost always incorporate sugar and oil, both of which ramp up the browning even further. As you work in cooler/slower heat transfer environments, New York doesn't go from majestic to barely edible like Neapolitan does. But it absolutely loses a LOT of character. Obsessives may argue over whether a 4 minute bake time is better than a 7 minute bake, but anyone that understands great pizza agrees that, as you start pushing into 9, 10, 11 minutes, that's just not going to be NY style at it's best.
Obviously, the original Modernist Cuisine was/is a big deal for many reasons, but, from a pizza perspective, they may not have invented steel plate, but, they put it on the map. With thick enough steel, you can take a 550-ish home oven and produce a life altering 4-5 minute NY style bake. This kicked off a home pizza baking revolution.
So, to finally answer your question, heat transfer is absolutely critical to the two most popular styles of pizza. There's absolutely no way to compensate for longer bake times. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. This being said... there are things that 500 degree oven owners can do.
First... very few people remember that, when the first MC came out, the steel plate page also referenced aluminum plate. The increased conductivity that makes steel transfer heat faster than stone causes aluminum to be superior to steel. From a perspective of bottom heat, aluminum plate at 500 can match the transfer of steel at 550. That's bottom heat, though. For this kind of setup to work, you absolutely have to have a broiler in the main oven compartment, not a broiler drawer below the main chamber. And the aluminum plate has to be thick- at least 3/4" of an inch. If you plan in cooking for larger groups of people, I'd go an inch or larger. You can get a reasonably sized 6061 aluminum plate for about $100 shipped.
Second, you can buy an Ooni. A good Ooni (I recommend the Koda 16) will run you considerably more than $100, but... an Ooni gives you Neapolitan. Neapolitan isn't happening in a 500 degree home oven.
Third, I can't vouch for them, but MC has recipes for other styles. Chicago styles (thin crust, deep dish) move into more of a pastry area, where intense heat isn't necessary. Detroit doesn't require a blazingly fast bake either.
Regardless of which direction you take, if you haven't experienced Neapolitan or fast baked NY style pizza, it's definitely worth pursuing.
