I've dealt with 30 year old engineered floors with the original finish, and a couple of screening and topcoating over it. If you take care of floors and don't let kids play roller hockey indoors, you too will never need to do a sand and refinish. The idea of "refinishing" as a criteria for choosing your floors is not really a valid concern. Choose a quality major brand, and you won't have any worries. No LL or box store crapola. $5-6 a square foot and up is where the good stuff starts. Under that, you can get some OK buys, but you're generally gonna have to do a lot more homework to make sure. So, what does "taking care of your floors" entail? Vacuuming a couple of times a week. Not allowing food and drink outside of the kitchen. Using rugs at all entries to capture the dirt from outside. Being a no shoes indoor household helps a lot too, but I'm not going to get into that classic arguement. Don't mop your floors. You can damp clean them, but people get all hung up over sloshing water on top of wood, and that's just a comple no no. Use something like a Bona cleaner a couple of times a month, max. Every other type of cleaning should be spot cleaning. But with food and drink confined to the appropriate spot, spills are minimized. Abrasion from debris is minimized by rugs that you frequently clean. And in 8-12 years, you do a refresher of a screening and recoating. You don't need to sand down to bare wood at all. Unless you don't do the above and wear through to bare wood.

Thanks all for your comments and replies, everything has been super helpful. In case anyone was wondering, I finalized the floor choice today, and ended up upgrading. Based on the responses here and others, I wanted to go for a matte, light color floor to hide scratches and dog fur better. The free option I had was only hickory and the light color was especially noisy, which I didn't think would blend well with our other selections. So the choice to upgrade was ultimately based on design aesthetic, and I believe the option I took is of better overall quality than the builder default. The floor is Kentwood Brushed Oak Sandstone https://kentwoodfloors.com/us/products/brushed-oak-sandstone-0, and will look something like this (this is a simulation image from kentwood site) I don't plan on sanding the floor... I will just replace it if I ever need to

@ Bigrednole - I'm interested in the Sand/refinish quote. As a rule of thumb a full sand and refinish (including stain) should run $5/sf (might be a snick more if you go with the HEAVY DUTY Bona Traffic HD or Loba 2K Supra AT). But not by much (maybe $1 more per square foot). A $3.50 LVP is midrange quality. Some of the best products run $4.99 - $6.99/sf. Those are the one's with a rigid WPC core and 20mil wear layer (which is the BEGINNING of a good wear layer). To install LVP you should be adding $2.50 - $3/sf for labour to INSTALL. This does NOT include subfloor preparation. You will need to add on for the LVP install: 1. Removal of hardwood floors - $2-$3/sf for removal and dumping fees 2. Subfloor preparation (sanding/filling/sanding and repairing) $2-$4/sf ($2/sf is most common) 3. Removal and replacement of baseboards/adding shoe or quarter round ($1-$2/ linear foot) The TOTAL cost of your $3.50/sf LVP: $3.50/sf material + $2 removal of hw + $2/sf subfloor prep + $2.50/sf install labour + $1/lf trim = $10/sf + cost of trim/mouldings At the end of the day, there is NO WAY a hardwood sand and refinish ($5-$7/sf at most) will be TRIPLE the cost of install of LVP. There is just no way a full sand and refinish of a wood floor (assuming the wood is fully intact and no additional repairs are needed) would cost. That would put the cost of refinishing the hardwood at $30 per square foot. I'm sorry but I just don't see that happening. What is the actual quote for your hardwood and what is the square footage of your hardwood?

@kenuss I believe mine is laguna vibes driftwood, I'm out of town until tomorrow but I can confirm that when I get home. Yes, I'm still very happy with it and get lots of compliments. No one knows it isn't full through real wood. It cleans beautifully. If something sticky drips in cracks you I may need to use a microfiber cloth by hand here or there but that is rare. It does have a lot of texture throughout each board with tiny grooves if you haven't actually seen a piece in person. I have 2 dogs and a parrot and other than sweeping it with a cordless hard floor vacuum with a soft roller in it a couple times a week for dog hair, beach sand & dust and moist mopping with a microfiber mop with sprayer or my mopping machine occasionally it doesn't need anything heavy duty or time consuming.