Real world life expectancy of a high end cartridge?

Cantilever bent 90 degrees! I actually had that! Stanton 681EEE. Needle-nose pliers bent it back. Straight as I could get it anyway. Still had a kink in it. Seemed to play just fine. Now, pretty sure if that happened with my Koetsu it would not sound the same. But it is all relative. Which is my point.

Like this whole thing about hours. What a lot of hoo-haw. As opposed to Hee-Haw, which at least had Roy Clark going for it.

My point would be, how much can it really matter? Pressure on the stylus contact patch is on the order of a ton per square inch. Pressure like that, whatever dirt is on there, ain't gonna be on there for long. Add to that, no record ever is perfectly clean. Cannot be. Even if it were somehow absolutely clean going on the platter, the second the stylus touches down it begins microscopically scraping and shaving and scattering tiny little bits of vinyl all over the place. So forget about that.

This is yet another one of those areas guys fret and stew and fuss over what don't amount to a hill of beans. You clean enough to get the obvious crud off. All the rest is marketing. 

Freon boils at minus 41 degrees Fahrenheit. Freon at normal room temp is a gas. But that's probably just the cheap freon everyone else uses. Obviously, Stylast uses the really good room temperature liquid freon.