Can I convince you that electric is better? No, I can't, because I don't think it is. The issue I have is related to how long it takes to warm up (and cool down). Electric cook tops just don't respond quickly. Little too hot? Too bad, nothing you can do about it (in time to save a dish that's starting to burn anyway). Not hot enough? Check back in 2 or 3 minutes. I find this particularly irritating when a recipe requires varying heats while cooking. Sorry I don't have better news for you.
For your missing equipment, calibration, and control, you will have to substitute vigilance and technique.
Basically, if you parbake your crust, you should get something good.
Turn on your oven, probably as hot as it'll go. Unless you have a thick crust and a very intense oven, it'll be hard to get too hot.
- Roll out your dough into a baking pan/cooking sheet/pizza pan.
- Bake in the oven until the dough is just starting to brown.
- Take it out, add toppings to the more-cooked side of the crust (flipping the crust, if necessary). Put it back in until the cheese starts to brown.
The process above is the lazy-man's method, and it works with my oven at 350F or at 500F or out on the grill at 750F and all points in between.
The "ideal" pizza that is the target of most pizza aficionados may well be beyond your reach. However, I make pizza a couple times a week, and most nights I don't worry about that. Delicious toppings on good bread and excellent cheese is a great meal, whether or not it matches stereotyped image of "pizza".
P.S. If you do get some equipment, get the pizza stone and put the crust directly on it (w/ or w/o parchment paper). Your crust will be crisper. In a pan, sometimes your crust may seem closer to bread than to pizza.
Best Answer
I don't see anything unusual here. Ovens are a big mass of steel and other materials that has to spend some time heating before it is at working temperature. Many ovens turn off as preheated somewhat earlier - see also this question where the answers speak of 15-20 minutes of preheating on average - but this doesn't have to be the correct answer for your case. Maybe you are looking for a higher temperature, maybe your oven is larger, or maybe your oven only has one heater on the bottom as opposed to the two heaters common in electric ovens. Also, I suspect that many ovens, even though they turn their light off as "preheated" after 15 minutes, are not truly as well heated as they should be - if I bake several things back-to-back, the later ones bake quicker and more evenly.
A pizza stone will actually make the preheating slower, because you are adding cold mass that needs to be heated. So don't expect any change there, unless you decide that, by having a pizza stone, you can afford to place the food in the oven before it has reached its desired temperature, hoping that the heating help from the stone will compensate for the too-low-starting temperature.
If this is the case and the oven is working as intended, there is not really anything you can do about it. Baking is a slow method anyway, so you have to just take it as it is. You may consider adding a large-sized toaster oven (one of those with 30-40 cm width and depth of the cooking space) and bake quicker things in it. It will be especially useful if your main oven doesn't have a top heater.
If you think that the oven is designed to preheat quicker, then you have to call customer support or an independent repair service to see where the defect comes from.