I choose kitchen utensils based on two criteria: how well they work for prep / cooking and how easy they are to clean up. In fact, I probably weight the cleanup criterion over the prep / cooking one since I do more cleanup than I do cooking in my household.
So when I’m cooking grits for breakfast, I have a choice of small pots to use. One fits easier in a little nook in the dishwasher, so that’s the one I usually use. My wife cooks a lot, so she thinks more about the prep / cooking end of things. She likes the way wooden spoons perform for cooking. Some of the ones we had are basically raw wood now – maybe they had a finish on them at one point and it wore off, so food tends to stick to them.
I’ve come across a few household products that worked well for a while but then started to flake off material as they aged about 10 years, and this sort of product dandruff accelerated to the point where I threw them away because I was tired of them leaving a trail of tiny garbage. I’m pretty sure no one considered the aging process when they chose the materials.