You might try posting in the flooring forums...

We've had polyurethane over oak for the last 14 years. This has held up well with minimal maintenance required. We refinished the kitchen area once in that time. In our remodel we are putting in some new floors and going with reclaimed oak flooring milled in downtown L.A. from beams salvaged from a railroad depot in Alabama. We will refinish all our floors at this time and going with either an oil finish or hard wax oil.

Our flooring installer recommended Waca oil but the place that made the flooring recommends a hard wax oil.

We ordered a bunch of sample colors of Waca oil to check out.

Here is one source of samples:

http://www.1877floorguy.com/wocooilsafte.html

Osmo Hard Wax oil is pretty popular. We'll probably order some samples from them as well:

http://worldclasssupply.com/store/OSMO-Wood-Wax-Finish-Transparent-Starting-as-low-as......html

My sense is that hard wax oil gives a bit more protection than just oil. I've only seen small samples of wood with these finishes and they look different.

Sounds like your finisher will be doing a waca-like treatment. You might want to check into a hardwax oil finish as well, so you know what your options are.

Our finisher used DuraSeal waterbased polyurethane. It was previously satin, which was very flat; but with the addition of more hardwood we had them take it up to semigloss and like the little extra depth and sheen a lot.

They do waterbase as a matter of course. I initially asked them to do oilbased instead, then someone on GW said it would yellow over time, so we changed our minds to waterbased. I really like it.

in the last house, we had quarter and rift sawn oak. We used a stain enhancer first, then one coat of stain (this produced the color we wanted better than two coats of stain without an enhancer - we did a test first). Then waterlox finish and then one coat of a low sheen polyurethane (mostly because I was not a complete convert of the waterlox product and chickened out a little).

The floors were absolutely gorgeous and held up well to the kids and dog.

We've used both products and found that the oil base does yellow or darken over time. It also has a very bad odor and I had to take my children who were young at that time to sleep somewhere else. With the waterbase that wasn't a problem. Waterbase dries much quicker but you need more coats. It is considered better generally for the environment. Oil based is said to wear better in high traffic areas.

A lot of the newer oils like waca are VOC free. Waca started having VOC free oil in 2008--

http://www.woodcareusa.com/about-us/voc-free

Okay. I posted on the floor site and no responses today. I contacted the floor refinisher.... and he is familiar with the hard wax oil, which is what I think I am definitely leaning towards. I like what I read about it looking natural and that it can be repaired with solution in patches if necessary, rather than needing to re-sand the whole floor down the road.
I have a feeling that this change after settling on a quote is going to cost me though.
I think OSMO and WACA are similar in that they are both hard wax oil. Correct me if I am wrong. More questions though, such as 1. Does this oil cause the yellowing and/or darkening over time, like I am reading about for oil based products or is that only with a polyurathane type product? 2. What would you estimate cost per square foot? 3. Can anyone share their experience with hard wax oil? or recommend a specific brand?

We used Bona Traffic which is water based, on our red oak floors. It was pretty expensive, but it's quite beautiful and we are very happy with it. As I recall, when we were deciding what to use, there was quite a lot of information in the
Flooring forum.

We used 2 coats of "street shoe" over 2 coats of water based poly on natural red oak floors.

The finish is beautiful and so far so good.

There was very little smell and we didn't have to leave the house for the applications.

We used the new Bona Traffic HD in extreme matte, it had almost no odor and seems to be crazy durable (2 dogs with nice long nails that love to run). The matte finish has just a slight shine and looks so much like just a natural wood floor, no plastic looking finish. We debated an oil finish, but are really happy we went with the water base Bona poly in the end.