> I half wonder if adding a larger heatsink, or even putting thermal mass around the existing oscillator could also help, or if the heating is more localized in the PCB itself.

That would likely make it worse. The trick here is that the other cores are running at essentially their maximum temperature and and will dynamically reduce their clockspeed if required to keep from going above that limit. In essence, the environment becomes actively temperature controlled. If the ambient heat goes higher, the cores clock lower, if it gets colder the cores clock higher (up to a point).

If you add too much heat dissipation, the total power used by those cores might not be enough to keep well above ambient.

I was thinking it might be nice to add some insulation around some the pi's enclosure, to reduce its cooling significantly. A little bit to tamp down any potential rapid fluctuations in the room's temperature (if someone opens a window, steps out of the bath, whatever). But more so that it could save a watt or two of power, by having the time-burner cores working much less.

You're right that this is a over-controller oscillator. The goal generally with ovens is to keep heat! (To an extent of course.)

Flirc makes a metal Pi case where the CPU is pressed against the metal body of the case, resulting in a huge thermal mass for passive cooling. I have a bunch of them and it works very well. No fan necessary.

> put a temperature sensor on the oscillator

At that point, couldn't we just use the temperature value to compensate for the drift?