LOL: my (late) uncle was a meat cutter and owned a butcher shop for many years: most of his surfaces were metal and plastic for easier cleaning.
> They cut a lot more cutting than any chef... and they are end grain
What butcher does and what a chef does are different things. Chefs do slicing, chiffonade, julienning, dicing, and chopping (vertical movements). Butchers do a lot quartering, deboning, chopping, and filleting (many more horizontal).
Further, if you look at a actual butcher blocks, you'll see that they were not tiny little cutting boards, but actual table/furniture. And the practical reason why they were what we now call 'end grain' is because they were a bunch of long pieces of lumber put together with some feet attached:
The tiny (3" in height) little things that are called "butcher block" nowadays are in the style of the giant tables of yore, but the fact they just happen to have a check board pattern is a aesthetic affectation to mimic that 'real' items of the past. Which is why splitting is probably a much more common occurrence as they're much less surface area for glue between the pieces, so 'moisture shifting' is more likely—which is why maintenance is much more important and needs to be done more often.
But feel free to get whatever: if you want to use up more oil in the regular maintenance of your cutting board (and having to do maintenance more often), I'm not going to stop you.
