What I don't understand is, why do dishwashers take so frikking long to do the dishes?
We only ever use our dishwasher on quick programme (30 minutes). Just have to give each item a quick rinse/light-scrub before it goes in. (If you put anything really dirty in there on the quick program it just spreads all of that mess around onto all of the other items and the hot water ensures it sticks nicely.)
At which point I have to say, what's the point in the dishwasher?
At the risk of repeating myself, we bought our dishwasher as a defence mechanism just before my parents (then aged 86 & 89) mived in with us.
My mother was a great hostess. Really good. The best.
We used to go there for Sunday lunch. The quid pro quo was that we took over the washing up and we did this mob-handed. I would wash up at one sink, Dez at the other and the rest of the family wielded tea towels. We didn't just wash up the stuff from Sunday lunch. We also washed a lot of the crockery that had been used during the week and that my parents had washed inadequately. My dad had quite bad macular degeneration and couldn't see the food that was left stuck to the plates. My mum was just a bit slapdash and didn't bother with quality control. Six of us took a little under half an hour to do the washing up, and we would generally go back into the lounge just before the end of Gardeners' Question Time.
"You were a long time, dear!" my mother would say to me when we had finished. They never knew that we were checking up on all their washing up during the previous week.
You can see that we didn't want the problem of them, after they moved in with us, of deciding after each meal that they they were going to do the washing up, as we would then have had to have done it all again properly. A dishwasher was the obvious solution and we had the first one for about 10 years before it gave up the ghost. We have had a Miele for the past 6 years and it has been very good. The one thing it isn't any good at is getting porridge off a saucepan. That I still do by hand.