A dining table comes back a year out, hazed across the middle and scratched where the place settings go, and the client swears nothing heavy ever hit it. No dropped pot, no kid standing on it, nothing. The maker hears that and doesn't believe it, because the finish was the hard stuff, the film that was supposed to take anything.
Believe the client. Nothing heavy ever hurt that top. Nothing heavy ever could.
Here's the mechanics of it, and it takes one paragraph. What marks a finish isn't force, it's pressure, and pressure is force divided by the area it lands on. A dinner plate spreads its load over square inches. A stack of books, a casserole straight off the rack, a flat palm leaned in hard: all the same story. Spread over that much area, the plate comes in about a thousand times too gentle to put a permanent dent in even a soft finish like shellac. It cannot mark the film. It never could. Every heavy thing the client was careful about was already harmless.
The damage comes from the small stuff. A single grit of sand caught under a sleeve and dragged six inches. The coarse rag somebody wiped the top with, the one that lived on the shop floor first. The unfelted foot of a chair, scooting in and out three times a day. None of these weigh anything. But they touch the film over a point instead of a plane, and the same modest force concentrated into a point is enough to push past what the film can spring back from. That's when it stops flexing and starts ploughing. The scratch the client can't explain came from a sleeve, not a casserole.
So when a client says "make it durable," that word means nothing until you know what the surface will actually see. Durable against weight is free; everything is durable against weight. Durable against grit and drag and chair feet is the real job, and it's a different question than which finish is hardest. Match the finish to the contact, then change what you tell the client at delivery. Felt the chair feet. Wipe the top with a clean cloth, because the cloth that did the floor carries the grit that does the cutting. Those two sentences will do more for that top than the next step up in finish hardness.
A word about wax, because wax gets sold wrong in both directions. Wax is not armor. It's a few microns thick and one sharp grit cuts through it and into the finish below in a single pass. But it isn't useless either. It has one narrow job and it does it well: it holds the look. A soft smear, a sleeve burnish, the dull spot where hands live, those marks just move the wax around, and a fresh buff moves it back. Wax buys back the look, not the toughness. Tell the client that and they'll re-wax happily for years. Let them believe it's protection and they'll skip the felt pads and blame you later.
One boundary on all this: this is about contact, things touching and dragging on the film. Heat rings and solvent spills are different failures with different fixes, and nothing here applies to them.
The casserole was never the problem. The grain of sand was. Sort what touches the top by how small it is, not how heavy, and the hazed-top mystery stops being a mystery.