[serf]

>Which I still wouldn't do. It's a commodity, engine oil, and largely the same between brands. Ditto with PM software. Or most any other software.

As a former mechanic I would like to point out a flaw in your way of thinking about engine oil as a commodity similar across the board.

Regular engine oils vary in overall quality not due to the oil itself being of substantially better or worse quality itself, but because of the different combinations of surfactants and detergents that the varying brands use, and molecular uniformity allowing tighter tolerances in the engineered part using the oil in question.

The more expensive the motor oil, the less it chemically looks like crude oil until you get to the most expensive types of oils (synthetics), which aren't crude based at all but synthesized using the Fischer-Tropsch process.

Precision engineered parts require synthetic oils. It's akin to placing your smartphone face down on an asphalt sidewalk. At high speeds and temperatures the contaminants in a lower grade oil will destroy the car that calls for the 50 dollar oil cans, and it'd be ill advised to ignore the need for it.