Strop more, sharpen less?

In a pinch re: Super Steels such as M390, SV35N, S110v if just maintaining and or touch up's I'll go to my Spyderco Ceramics first using the Sharpmaker. After the Uf Stone I go to 1.0 and .5 micron diamond paste on Basswood. Sometimes I go in a progression of 3.0, 1.0, .5 micron. I get what you all say in the previous post but for me this just plain works. When the time comes, I have the Hapstone to lean on.
 
Tseg said:
I mainly use S35VN steel. I chop down 15-20 boxes for my recycling bin a week. Every few weeks my blade slices through paper like butter less easily. At that point I would "sharpen" my knife again, 2K/6K stone by hand ~20 strokes on each side of stone and each side of blade and then 3 micron / 1 micron / .5 micron strop. My blades would be back to razor sharp.

More recently after several weeks of use I'd take my knife just through the 3/1/.5 micron stropping exercise, avoiding the stone, and it seems my knives get back to razor sharpness as if I had taken them to stone. I'm sure this is much healthier for the longevity of my blades. Since I've only started to do this is the past month obviously I will have to stone sharpen at some point, but might that be once a month, every other month...?

Anyone else have this observation? Is there a downside to this approach? Will I end up with the same amount of stone strokes over time, just more in 1 sitting when I eventually do my sharpening? What is "normal". What is "optimized'.
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I use a strop often for maintenance. In fact if I don't, it is just to keep up on minimalist stone work skills and serves no functional advantage in most cases.

Keeping in mind:
I am using a very hard stropping surface
and abrasive that will work on the steel - diamond where necessary.

I have kept some kitchen knives, machetes, and hatchets sharp essentially indefinitely without a stone. The harder - higher carbide content the less well this works, though still can be taken a long way.

As the knife dulls it forms a "wear bevel" that the strop cannot really fix, so as long as the touchups are done fairly often it works better. That said if the steel is relatively low RC a hard strop can do an incredible job of edge restoration. Case in point I came across a parign knife in a box in the basement I haven't seen in over a decade. Felt dull, couldn't shave arm hair. Less than two minutes on a Washboard with reclaimed SiC from a Crystalon stone and it was shaving hair and crosscutting phonebook (I still have one!) paper 90/90.

And yes, since I started doing more maintenance w/ hard strop the effective lifetime of my knives is much longer. On a soft strop it reduced lifespan as the rounded bevel faces needed more stone work to true up at the original angle.
 
I subscribe to the "keep your knife sharp" rather than the "keep sharpening your knife" school of thought. Strop to keep it sharp, sharpen only when you can strop no more.
 
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