Accuracy-wise, it’s always best to have a mainspring on full wind, because movements lose timing consistency as the mainspring force drops (no movement has perfect isochronism).

Wear wise for the winding works should be identical. Assuming you’re not letting the watch stop entirely, then winding 60 turns every 2 days and winding 30 turns every 1 day is exactly the same number of turns.

Fatigue for the mainspring is probably negligiblg different either way. The difference is that you’re cycling the spring deeply but less often (20%-100%), vs cycling it shallowly but more often (60%-100%, but twice as often). There are equations to estimate fatigue but it would have to depend on the spring design and material details.

Put simply, skyrocketing prices have a cost by destroying culture. When people who really love horology starts being priced out and becomes the downmarket, the upmarket ends up being this — waiting lists, fluff, and wealth signaling. Eventually it just becomes a signaling playground for the rich.

Welcome to “gentrification”. They don’t care what you love or hate. Someone with more money than you has moved in, and it’s their tastes that matter now.

It really depends on the model. You can change bracelets all day on many watches without any trouble, then suddenly hit a very high tolerance end link (e.g. GS, Rolex) and suddenly stare at all the scratches wishing you had springbar tweezers before you started.

For example, depending on the tolerance and lugs, the spring bar itself can scratch the lugs on its way coming out no matter how you have taped the lugs, if you don’t have spring bar tweezers that can compress both sides at the same time.

None of this matters of course if you don’t care about scratches.

I think it’s more holistic, though, at least to my understanding. Yes, it means less wear to the escapement teeth and jewels, but it also (theoretically) meant that long term isochronism from the years-long process of oils drying out does not influence timekeeping.

Because since a lever movement impulse is always delivered by sliding, in theory as oils dried over the years there should be a very slow change to timekeeping no matter what you did. I believe the goal of George Daniels in the late 1960s was to mitigate that and basically compete with quartz accuracy that was sprouting all around at the time, and have a watch that had perfect timekeeping for 10-15 years as the oil dried out.

He was very proud of his double impulse escapement in Space Traveler, for example, which had a high accuracy quartz level of accuracy (1s / month, though to be fair, it was a pocket watch and not a wristwatch) https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/george-daniels-space-traveller-world-record-sothebys

You can also see that oral history of the original motivation being told by his protege Roger Smith in this Talking Watches 6 years ago (RIP to the show): https://youtube.com/watch?v=M1Be89xssps

Apparently you are the Warren Buffet of watch flipping! All hail

And how many have you sold?

Note: if you are holding on to any watches that you don’t really wear anymore, but you haven’t bothered selling, because you know you wouldn’t get much for them, then you’ve lost 100% of the value of those watches.

I don’t understand. You didn’t lose money when you sold the watch. You lost money when you bought the watch. It’s not supposed to be an investment vehicle.