My tools serve me, not the other way around. It’s not worth the time and effort to wash by hand or sharpen on a whetstone. I don’t need an expensive knife to cook at home. A pull through sharpener and honing steel are adequate. Get the right material and you don’t have to worry about the metal in the dishwasher.
You know there’s a million different alloys that are all “stainless steel” right?
As far as some more specifics, nothing else you made is meant to hold a sharp edge, so they aren’t made of heat treated tool steel. Making a knife is a balance between having softer metal that dulls more quickly, vs harder metal that chips or cracks more easily.
Another feature you’ll notice on your stainless steel knives is a sharp edge, which is much more delicate than the blunt edges on everything else you listed. The thinness of the edge, combined with the metal being hardened so it can retain an edge, make it so you’re reasonably likely to chip the edges of many nicer (better heat treated) knives due to stuff knocking around in the dishwasher. Also you’re somewhat likely to damage the coating of the dishwasher racks with the sharp edges.
Also, probably not Wusthof, but some high end knives are, in fact, hand sharpened even in factory settings still. It doesn’t take very long on a wheel or belt really, though if you don’t count that as hand sharpening then yeah that’s a definitions disagreement.
No shit, again, tell me how the dishwasher harms my stainless knives? And I could tell you the exact stainless my knives are, as well as my cookware, and my bowls. I’ve done TONS of research on my kitchen gear. It’s also supposedly bad to wash my stainless cookware too, hasn’t hurt it yet - the dishwasher runs between 1 and 3 times a day, we cook so much.
I’ve tested multiple brands (with different stainless, the big difference is the nickel percentage) and none have been affected - they don’t even stain.
I’ve washed my steak knives from the same set that I’ve had for 10 years now - you can’t tell the difference, they get sharpened about 1/4 as often as my chef’s knife, because I use it all the time.
Seriously, it’s stainless fucking steel, that was forged and tempered at temperatures far beyond the 200 degrees of a dishwasher. What is it exactly about the dishwasher that supposedly fucks up my knives that aren’t fucked up from the dishwasher? (And I use cheap-as powder detergent, the cheapest I can find, and my shit comes out clean).
Now I wouldn’t run a carbon steel knife through the dishwasher, because it would have a bad reaction with the detergent, and it would rust which I’d then have to cleanup.
I didn’t say anything about the heat treat or anything, specifically because, like you said, the dishwasher isn’t reaching temperatures where that matters.
I also didn’t try to claim that your detergent would rust your knives. This is literally all just you.
All I said at the end of the day, is that your knife edge is more delicate that everything else you’re comparing it to, and your dishwasher can bang it against things which may chip it somewhat, unlike everything else you’re comparing the knives to.