To the first point, I get the heuristic of a cost-benefit analysis of buying vs renting, with hidden costs being things like maintenance (liabiliities), opportunity cost, transactional convenience (friction). But this heuristic is just that, it has no validation power over e.g. the commenter who pointed out "I want the long car rides to be in my own car which I know and love". Etc. Your mistake is using a heuristic (from idealized spherical cow economics) as a totalizing theory for human motivations.
To the second point, what a dining room offers is social intimacy and formality at once. This is something a kitchen table does not do (formality, think a White House dinner), and a restaurant cannot do either (intimacy, think traditional cultural celebrations at home such as Chinese New Year entailing many social rituals and practices). A dining room has the fundamentally distinct property of being a setting for both. That's the actual source of disagreement which is why there were so many objections by other commenters given your continued insistence that "it's not that different".
To the second point, what a dining room offers is social intimacy and formality at once. This is something a kitchen table does not do (formality, think a White House dinner), and a restaurant cannot do either (intimacy, think traditional cultural celebrations at home such as Chinese New Year entailing many social rituals and practices). A dining room has the fundamentally distinct property of being a setting for both. That's the actual source of disagreement which is why there were so many objections by other commenters given your continued insistence that "it's not that different".