Not really.
There are objective choices to be made based upon widely differing NOACK values, low temperature performance, TBN retention, as well as viscosity within any given grade and HTHS viscosity.
There are personal preferences involved that are not emotional.
Some users prefer to avoid sodium add packs, some prefer a shot of moly while others like titanium. Some like to see a lot of magnesium while others prefer an abundance of calcium.
Some like to see a nice slug of boron.
These may all be different roads to the same end, but there are measurable performance differences and most of the higher tier OTS oils exceed the API minimums by a comfortable margin, while most OTS API spec oils can't come close to the various Euro specs.
Plenty of room for objective choices in selecting an oil, although I agree with you in that any API SL/SM/SN oil will do a pretty good job of getting an engine past 200K as long as drain intervals are reasonable for the oil selected, the engine in question and the use to which that engine is put.
Let me put this another way.
Select an OTS API SN oil you'd run for 10K.
Would you do the same with any OTS API SN?
Not all oils are equal and so not all API SN oils are functionally equal.
There are objective choices to be made based upon widely differing NOACK values, low temperature performance, TBN retention, as well as viscosity within any given grade and HTHS viscosity.
There are personal preferences involved that are not emotional.
Some users prefer to avoid sodium add packs, some prefer a shot of moly while others like titanium. Some like to see a lot of magnesium while others prefer an abundance of calcium.
Some like to see a nice slug of boron.
These may all be different roads to the same end, but there are measurable performance differences and most of the higher tier OTS oils exceed the API minimums by a comfortable margin, while most OTS API spec oils can't come close to the various Euro specs.
Plenty of room for objective choices in selecting an oil, although I agree with you in that any API SL/SM/SN oil will do a pretty good job of getting an engine past 200K as long as drain intervals are reasonable for the oil selected, the engine in question and the use to which that engine is put.
Let me put this another way.
Select an OTS API SN oil you'd run for 10K.
Would you do the same with any OTS API SN?
Not all oils are equal and so not all API SN oils are functionally equal.