You finish on the strop. Fifty passes a side, counted out, on a clean piece of leather, because that's what you were taught and the edge does come up shiny. It feels like the part where the magic happens.
Two things about that are wrong, and a third is half right. Sorting them out takes five minutes and changes what you do at the bench tonight.
Start with the leather. A clean strop does almost nothing. Verhoeven ran the experiments and found the natural abrasives in bare leather, hard side or soft, aren't enough to polish an edge. Clean stropping has only a minor effect on the burr you came in with. So if you've been dragging a blade across plain leather and wondering why it never seems to do much, that's your answer. It isn't doing much. The compound is the tool. The leather is just what you stick the compound to. Load it.
Now the part that reorders the whole act. Stropping is not about removing the wire edge. What a loaded strop actually does is build a tiny steeper bevel right at the very tip. Call it two degrees, over the last few microns of the edge, and no further back than that. The loose fibers on the surface give a little under the blade, and that flex lets the abrasive ride up and work the apex at a steeper angle than the flat bevel behind it. That steeper micro-edge is more durable than the geometry behind it. That's the product. That's what you're paying for with all those passes.
And there aren't many passes worth paying for. The amount of steel involved is almost nothing. SEM cross-sections put the finished apex less than 300 nanometers off the old bevel line after more than two hundred laps. Most of that change happens in the first three. Count to fifty if you like the rhythm, but understand you're done long before you get there.
One more, because it saves you money. Chasing ever-finer compound hits a wall fast. A conservator who sharpens knives for a living says he can't tell the difference in use between a blade stropped at 0.1 micron and one at 0.025. If a professional can't feel it, you're not going to either. Half-micron chromium oxide already puts you at razor-blade edge widths. Past that you're buying numbers, not edges.
So here's the whole thing. Charge the strop with compound. Take a few light passes, three or four, not fifty. Stop. The leather gives you the geometry, the compound gives you the polish, and the edge is done. You don't need a ritual. You needed it loaded.