That totally chimes with my view as a collector John - the seller should act as a custodian and leave decisions on restoration to the eventual owner. I think Rolex is partly to blame for the trend of refinishing cases, as they routinely refinish the case and replacement components at servicing and have been known to refuse the service if case polishing is declined. It's not just Rolex of course, many manufacturers set out to return the watch as near pristine as possible after servicing - we've seen some examples of how extensive the work has been by TAG-Heuer too.

For the majority of their customers, that's probably exactly what they want. For a small subset of collectors though, it's less than ideal and the manufacturers have been slow in recognising that. To be fair, though, it's probably not a significant part of their income so there's no financial incentive for them to offer a more sensitive service although it would be nice from that curatorial point of view. It does allow specialists to come in and offer that service for collectors, as we see on this forum.