Eddie, we hired a mulcher for our roads and a dozer to dig a hole and push a house into it. I much preferred the results of the mulcher but, a dozer could have created those roads if we'd wanted it to. We would have had burn piles to deal with, like you said though, and that wasn't really what I wanted.
My point is, I know everything you're saying is accurate but, if you only had one machine to use and had to choose between a mulcher or a dozer, which machine will you be able to keep busier?
I can actually do a pretty good job of clearing most of the brush in South Texas with a rotary cutter, it's mostly smaller stuff that's easy to push over with a tractor but, the cutter leaves a real mess on the ground that needs to be dealt with. Not as much as a dozer would but definitely more than a mulcher does.
In a perfect world, I'd own a mulcher, a D5 or D6 sized dozer and an excavator but, I can only afford to do one thing at a time and whatever I buy needs to be able to earn it's keep. I really have more use for a dozer on my own place because I'd like to put in a tank and need to do some building site prep so I kind of lean in that direction but looking at it from a longer view, I want the next machine I buy (which is probably about a year away) to be the one that I'll be able to earn the most with, even if it's not the one I would have more personal use for.
In South Texas, it took me 2 months to get a mulcher on my place and I paid $275/hr for it. It took 2 weeks to get a dozer and I paid $150/hr for that, so I know they'll both stay busy and the mulcher has a higher hourly rate but, the mulcher also needs more maintenance and so it costs more to run.
Like I said, lots of pros and cons to both, I'm just wondering of the two, which would the more experienced contractors choose first?