I know many people who have had to replace or service their "high efficiency" machines within 5-10 years, while many old washers seem to last at least 20 years without service. Given the electronics and specialty parts in the new machines, it seems doubtful that you could keep one of them in service for more than 15 years.
I never spent so much time looking for an appliance. I must have spent 6 hours looking at Amazon, Home Depot, Best Buy, etc, websites. There are so many models, sizes and types. The model that died was ~25 years old. It performed well, but the company doesn't make microwaves anymore (Sanyo)... at least I didn't see that brand when searching.
In the scheme of a remodel or new-construction adding the high-quality, durable options is a small expense and saves on very expensive repairs down the road where you have to pay $2,000 to replace an item that would only have cost a few dollars more to install one that will almost never need replacing.
Alas, we never did anything with the idea.
You also hit on something that I think too many people don't think of when they're pricing stuff. People tend to look at the sticker price alone, not the total cost of ownership. I've found that often (but certainly not always), the more initially expensive but high-quality stuff will end up being cheaper in the long run.
Do your research. I witnessed an office where the CEO's partner was an interior decorator, and said partner was responsible for the office construction.
In the opulent kitchen, they put two commercial dishwashers, the kind where you preload the dishes onto a kind of rack, and slide the whole rack into the dishwasher in one step.
Greatly increases utilization of such dishwashers, because the dirty dishes can be queued up for washing, and the clean ones can be unloaded and put away while the dishwasher is running.
These dishwashers were designed around maximizing utilization during busy periods. But.
In an office kitchen, they would be run once or twice a day most of the time, with bursts only happening during infrequent events. This turned out to be an unexpected problem.
It seems the dishwashers were full of steel for durability, and they needed to run a load to warm up. Once warm, they could to load after load at high speed. But when only doing one load a day, they wouldn't clean the dishes properly.
The vendor told them this and suggested they have one "prosumer" model and one commercial model for when they had a catered event, but this displeased the CEO's partner, so the company was stuck with two commercial units.
They learned to run an empty load every day before running a full load, wasting enough time that the dishwasher lost its speed advantage. It also wasted water and energy do do one preload for each daily load.
Something to think about when buying commercial. It's usually ok, but sometimes, a commercial unit has tradeoffs that will gravely undermine its ability to function in a home or office.
You make a very good point, but I don't think that whether its commercial or not is what you need to look at. The intended use case is. There are several commercial use dishwashers, for instance, that are intended for relatively infrequent use. The ones you describe were intended for heavy-duty restaurant use -- that's the real mismatch, not the fact that they were built for commercial use.
The infrequent commercial resturant / office kitchen models you mention are good, but lab/ medical models are what I imagine most people want.
You can get them based on power and water availability (real 240v+ hot water heating element!!!), high pressure pumps, all stainless parts, sanitary cleaning in under 10 mins, and can use active heating for drying. Fully programmable wash cycles, both time and temperature, but in an under counter residential-like form factor. Get one of these, plus some fryer clean out detergent, and you're set.
Also, they're easily 3-10x the price of higher end residential models.
My TV has a terrible display but doesn't know how to connect to the internet, for example.
Less is more, more is less. Less is better, more is worse.