doing your decoction in a pressure cooker.
That too found a brief mention. Some breweries used decoction under pressure in order to improve not the quality but the quantity (i.e. efficiency). The practice however has been abandoned because it lead to "hard" and "broad" tasting beers. In some cases even to a straw like taste. I don't exactly know how to paraphrase "hard" and "broad" properly but it is used in the context of beeing the opposite to mild and balanced.
When it comes to the comparison with infusion mashes the author makes a reference to the urge to mash very well modified malts with overly short mashes which can lead to "green" tasting beers with an unsatisfactory quality of the bitterness. In some cases, especially for maltier light colored lagers and Export styles, dough-in at at lower temperature corrected that problem. This meant that instead of doughing in at 62 C the dough in happens at 50 C with an immediate heating to 62 C (1 C/min is common) .
I found that an interesting statement. Nothing is mentioned about the addition of specialty malts to "emulate" decoction flavor in an infusion mash beer. However, that was mentioned in another book by the same author. Given that decoction has little impact on color in light beers I can understand that specialty malts may not be an option in many cases where a brewery wants to move to an infusion mash w/o loosing the character of their brand of beer.
There is also a reference to experiments where decoction and equivalent infusion mashes were compared. In these cases no differences in beer quality were found.
None of this is really conclusive but it does seem to support the findings of some home brewers who compared beers brewed w/ and w/o protein rests and found that the protein rest did give the beer more character.
Kai