The longest I have owned a recent model Honda product was a 2004 Acura up to 120K miles, and I only changed oil when the minder called for it, approx every 10,000 miles (using conventional dino oil). And it also only wanted a filter every other oil change, so the filters went approx 20,000 miles. Never had a lick of trouble from the engine until we traded it, and never any oil consumption between the changes. I think the Honda engineers knew what they were doing when they spec'd that 10K oil change interval and 20K filter change interval, despite it seeming very contrary to older practices.
The only thing I can't comment on is the annual change requirement when time trumps the mileage requirement, other than one data point. Due to low usage, my BMW sports car reaches the time limit before it hits the mileage limit. I skipped the oil change the first year, mainly because I was following the computer maintenance minder as the manual recommended, only to find out later it really doesn't have the smarts to count time other than to extrapolate a service date on the calendar based on mileage (you'd think with that much coding, they could also have built in a simple counter if they wanted yearly oil changes). Anyhow, it got an oil analysis done at the two year mark when it got its first oil change at about 8,000 miles, and the numbers came back looking just fine. So there was no downside to waiting 2 years on that car, at least at low mileage, and running synthetic oil.
That car is no longer under the free maintenance, so I will be doing future changes myself. I expect I will get an oil analysis done again at the next 1-year mark just to educate myself and see if the annual changes are really needed. The car only gets 4,000-5,000 miles per year of mostly highway driving, and with synthetic oil I suspect it can go 2 years between changes without concern.
