David Weaver
since you can't really get a good shave with an incomplete edge, but you can do good woodwork, there's a desire on the shaving side to create more OWTs. OWTs breed where there is a possible explanation, or one that seems plausible even if it isn't.

I don't frequent shaving forums and didn't for too long as they're not really results based and people who have never sharpened anything are starting with the most sensitive thing you could sharpen (or one of the most).

My opinion, the hand held scope is what someone needs to have if they want to judge what their stones are doing and what they're doing. Not to make things take longer, but to learn to make them take less long.

A process to set up and hone a truly dull razor out of use is about 10 minutes, but it can be done wrong or ruined pretty easily. Or it can be learned and done easily. what folks end up doing is a bunch of work and the finest work doesn't get to the edge. If they had a hand held scope and spent 2 minutes confirming that they had uniform scratches to the edge each time and no damage in the edge, then they'd learn what makes results the first time.

So what follows is old wives tales and unlikely culprits. These same things end up in woodworking tools, but you can use the tools just fine without worrying about it if they're kind of sharp.

The unlikely culprits are proposed after an hour of this or that, and my comment would generally be " buy a hand held scope because whatever you're doing, you probably don't have the finest scratches all the way to the edge on both sides of the bevel".

"oh no, that can't be it. It's probably microchipping, a defective razor, large particles in the stropping compound, bovine leather instead of horse leather, ..."

on and on. And 95% of the time or more, the first look through a microscope shows things like the 3rd picture in this post does - the faces of the honed areas are bright almost right away, but the bits hanging around in the edge are still there. I can't see them. my vision is better than 20/20. I don't think anyone can see them - they don't reflect enough light to show up.