And yet many Toyota engines are known to last hundreds of thousands of miles. While not the only brand able to do so, they are certainly renowned for their longevity even with dealer or quick-lube service oils and filters.
I do 100% agree that having good filtration is important. But what I have said for years is that filtration is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Engines made with modern designs which run very clean, and which are made with modern manufacturing quality processes, don't need clinically clean oils; they don't need the ultra-super-duper "best" filter ever made by man.
Further, sump cleanliness is also a function of the OCI duration. Because most engines run very clean today (we see UOAs with low soot and insoluble counts as evidence of their clean combustion process), there's just not a lot of debris in large sizes and large quantities that result in high wear.
Most certainly, if you run an engine that is known to run dirty (poor combustion process) or you're going to run a really long OCI (well past 10k miles), then you'll want a higher quality filter.
But we cannot ignore the massive amount of anecdotal data (literally hundreds of thousands of vehicle examples) of Toyotas that run OE filters and lubes, and yet have very long-lived engines. The logical conclusion is that super-fine lube filtration is subject to the law of diminishing returns; the more you spend, the less it matters.
The key to understanding my comment is that there is a difference between how well a filter can clean the oil, versus how efficient does the engine really need the filter to be? Engine wear is a function of many things:
- lube filter efficiency and capacity
- OCI duration
- TCB
- Oil base and add pack
- air filtration efficiency and capacity
- starting and driving cycles
- etc
The lube filter only represents one of these important criteria. Significant improvements in filtration are not often rewarded with tangible improvements in engine wear. Once the filter is "good enough", making it "better" doesn't really pay off in a modern engine under "normal" OCIs.
A good well built filter of good efficiency is very important. But past that point, it doesn't matter much; you don't get much if any ROI.
Given the examples of poor quality we've seen recently (in many brands and models of filters), I care FAR more about quality of build than I do the efficiency. Unfortunately, it seems to be a crapshoot these days.