I'm one of those. Had a heck of a time with the 4.y.o Incognito with whole house softener. But: turns out I had the softener set to 0. Bad idea. I turned up the setting a bit. Also disabled the salt feature in the Miele via programming by one of their techs over the phone. Etching has been resolved with use of Miele tabs and, I think, water softener adjustment. Big but: I have a new Optima in our apartment and it's a much improved dw. I don't have the salt feature enabled at all and it runs perfectly on our city water. I use the Miele tabs. Absolutely no hint of etching, no issues at all. The Optima rocks. Both have cold water hook ups -- I use the china and crystal cycle. Even if you don't need it dishwise, it's a bit shorter than the Normal setting and does a great job. Optima has the express which I also use if I'm in a hurry (half a tab, no wrapper to fool it). Others here (catmom for sure) have hot water hookup and no issues with Optima.

You need to focus on which model(s) have the wash features and racking options that fit your needs or lifestyle. DOn't get hung up on trying to find one without the built in water softener, they can always be turned off. N.B. some people find that their whole house softener produces too soft water for good washing. That can cause etched glassware too. Some will end up with a water bypass to the DW and using the built in softener on the Miele.

I was hoping for a few more responses, we didn't have much time to decide. We went ahead and got the Optima. I'm not convinced it was the best decision, but I do know the Optima is a fine dishwasher, so what the heck. Were *were* going to get a new Inspira, but Miele changed the handles on the new models and we would have to pay an extra $135 just to get the old-style handle (which matches our Samsung refrigerator perfectly. So in the end, who knows? We got what we got.

The tabs really do a great job (there are some older threads with loads of posts singing their praises!). We used Cascade Complete initially, but Miele came out with the tabs sometime around when we first started using our DW. A bunch of GW'ers tried them and kept raving about them so we decided to give them a try. The CC worked perfectly fine and everything came out spotless. However, the tabs seem to give the loads an extra level of clean and sparkle. Also, the air in the DW just had a fresher quality (odor) after running a load with the tab vs CC. The DW after a CC cleaned load isn't bad, just less fresh smelling. FWIW, some on this forum use 1/2 a tab (and possibly even 1/4 tab?) to clean most loads. Again, my stuff comes out fine with a 1/2 tab, but a full tab just seems to raise that sparkle and clean to another level. It's not overly noticeable, in fact, I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me, but some others here have said the same thing. We don't usually run our DW every day, so I like the sense of security (that everything will get clean) that using a full tab gives. Last night I had a pretty empty DW, but one of those few items was a stinky plastic food container that would have been quite foul smelling by morning let alone this evening, so I ran the DW before bed instead of waiting, with a 1/2 tab and everything came out great. PS there were some posters who had trouble with grit (undisolved soap powder) build up in their rack glides from using Ecover so you might want to do a search for those threads discussing that.