I can only give you my experience. I've lived for over 20yrs on real hardwood floors. And every time I stand on any kind of laminated plank it looks and feels like cheap plastic. There is just no comparison to actual wood flooring. Timber absorbs vibration, feels pleasant underfoot either barefoot or shoed. It looks real, because it is. Timber planks are 20mm thick, laminate ones are 5mm. Laminate flooring looks like a printed piece of plastic because, well it's very similar except for the top 2mm of veneer stuck to it. It may fool us in brochures and magazines but I've never once been fooled by laminate in person. They can give it all the fancy names they want like 'engineered' but at the end of the day it's all the same stuff. Laminated veneers on cheap plywood. But not one person on the planet has ever fooled that it's a real floorboard. Does timber scratch? Absolutely. So don't put a piano finish on it then. Stick with satin and matte finishes. It shows up the marks a lot less. Does timber dent? Absolutely. But those dents become part of the character of the home over time. I recently lived in a home with floorboards over 100yrs old. They had dents everywhere and yet those boards just looked lived on, they didn't look terrible. Does timber suffer water damage? Yes of course. But before you worry about it, go and check out the thousands of 100yrs old hardwood homes sitting on flood plains in this country. Every single one of them has been underwater more than once in it's lifetime. The original boards are there, strong and unfazed. Unless you plan to flood your home for weeks on end the occassional spill and overflow won't damage the timber at all. I'm a quality over quantity type of person so of course I'm going to rate going with the lifetime option over the rip it out every 5yrs option. If I had the money for hardwood I would not even consider plastic planks.

That is a dilemma in this day and age, our house is 50-60 years old with stunning jarrah floor boards...I would probably not use now as thinking about sustainability of our forests..I actually used bamboo in our last home for that reason .. Bamboo often gets a bad wrap...we had ours down for about ten years before we moved..I still really loved it, there were a few dings but nothing major, no worse than floor boards, we did use the top range boards that could be re sanded, not that they needed it even when we moved...had floor protecting felt on chairs etc as we do here as well

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