I can totally respect where you're coming from. I would never encourage someone to do something with fire they weren't comfortable with. Years of experience and you get more comfortable doing things. Vigilance and awareness to ever-changing conditions for the specific location are vital. The wind may be blowing one way at one pile, and a completely different direction 50' away at another pile.
Around here, this is our reality. It's all forest, meadow, or a mixture of both. We're largely living in a post-logging environment, which has changed the landscape and how it had developed previously for thousands of years.
Then people built wooden homes out of highly combustible and ember-receptive materials. In the woods. And then don't maintain their combustible brush (and/or plant plants with highly volatile oils/leaves RIGHT UP AGAINST their houses), which then becomes trees that threaten to crush and/or light-aflame their homes.
So, we do what we do to make it safer for the inhabitants and more like the forest before it was logged.
If we have to shut down burning because conditions change, we do. But we had enough humidity and fog to get away with burning until the fourth of July last year.