Nope not a crappy Poly..just the ultra high expectations of consumers today. Anyone that knows wood and how it will perform understand that this is absolutely normal and they are going to continue for as long as you have the wood. now dont get me wrong, prefinished will have a tougher finish coat than site finished. That is just a fact and can be proven with research. I will say that there are a couple of Canadian companies and also Shaw applying now applying the aluminum oxide on top and have come up with a way to do it without clouding the wear layer. This is a product that amps of the resistance to abrasion big time. You have mostly abrasions...very few scratches at this point. The scratches will come and you must not worry about them. it adds to the patina of floor. For the people who to do not want to see what you are seeing, they should go to hand scraped or distressed flooring as old English will address the issue with perfection. There is no answer for you my friend..only that what you are experiencing is very normal. To take off your shows, and try not to ever mark the floor is placing undue hardship on you, your family, your pets and all else who enters your domain. Enjoy those damned floors just the way they are and understand that those marks are normal and you have the best flooring in your home that money can buy. They can be screened at a later date to make them museum quality once again, but who lives in a museum. I had pre finished floors laid 2 years ago and we have a beautiful high dollar home. I also puked in about 2 weeks and they I came to realize..such is life with Hardwood. Enjoy. Good Luck.

Really? But we put down the same wood in another room several years ago, poly-ed it with oil-based poly and it's never showed the same scuffing. We just hated how long it took to put down the oil-based stuff, so we went with water-based on this room.

We're going to be putting our house on the market in a couple months, and I'm worried that if buyers come at the wrong time of day, when the sun is shining across the floor, they're going to have major second thoughts.

I've been looking into flooring recently. 99% of todays prefinished flooring comes with the aluminum oxide in the polyurethane to make it harder. These finishes do not develop a time worn patina like a wood floor does. Most of the flooring is so over processed and has thick, glossy coatings that the beauty of the wood is lost. I'm not understanding the desire for this. There are even UV coatings so the wood doesn't mellow. When it scratches, if deep enough, they will be white. There is a solution to minimize them. I was just told that minor scratches can be buffed out (first I've heard of that).

I've gotten mixed information so far on whether they can be refinished down the road like the old wood floors. The coating is very hard and sanding them is a health hazard.

These flooring companies sure know how to wreck a beautiful piece of wood. I hope there are lots of others who feel this way. I see some matte and satin finishes coming out so am hoping the trend will revert back to an appreciation of wood's true natural beauty with its inherent properties that eventually create that soft warm glow and patina that make it so desirable in the first place.