I completely understand and respect that, I was speaking from a practical perspective of keeping the engine running for as long as possible while keeping cost and complexity to a minimum, not a hobbyist perspective of trying to stretch the last mile out of their very high end oil.
I agree that modern oils are amazingly good, but that still doesn't address the undisputable fact that the oil is going to become contaminated with carbon, soot, dust from the air, wear particles too small to be removed by standard filters, etc. The best oil in the world doesn't do much good if it's full of abrasive particles.
Of course the intended usage is a critical variable too. If the goal is to keep something for 50-100K miles and then get something else like many fleets do, maintenance isn't nearly as important as if you plan to keep something for decades.
Here's the valvetrain of a 28 year old 357K mile Civic engine. It was owned by a Honda tech since new until he passed away a couple years ago and he changed the oil every 4K miles. Many would call that wasteful, but when it runs as good as new, burns no significant amount of oil, and is that clean this many years and miles later, was it really wasteful? Do you think the engine would still be in that condition if he tried to experiment with 10K+ mile oil changes?
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