The vinyl record is very limited in bandwidth, especially in the bass and wears out quickly, attenuating the high frequencies which then disappear irremediably after a few passages. The struggle between diamond and plastic is unequal. Concerning the cartridges, all are colored and even the low end reads any disc perfectly with ease, restoring the entire musical message (at least what remains after pressing, which is destructive for all details).
I never spent more than $250 for a Denon 103, a Sumiko Blue Point Special (old model), several Ortofons (I keep the X3, a high-level MC), an AKG and a few Shure (70 & 75, excellent even without considering price) and a Sony XL 15. Delivered with an old turntable of the brand (PS T 15) purchased for $15. My favorite arm is their PS LX 300 H).
I also had a Rega Planar 2 with a Jelco arm with detachable shell but the motor failed and I sold it. The belt antiskating (?) no longer worked either.
There are certainly limits in bandwidth, which are well understood.
The wear issues are massively dependent on a variety of other factors...
Take an average TT, put a conical stylus cartridge on there, and run it at 2g to 3g - which is quite common for current setups - and you will have a lot of wear.
Factors that can dramatically increase wear include:
High VTF ( lower vtf = lower wear, through lower force being applied to the vinyl) - but counterintuitively look at tracking
Tracking - when the contact patch on the needle cannot maintain consistent contact with the track walls, it bounces, skips and surfs the track wall waves... this is called mistracking. - the problem with it is greater than merely decreased sound quality - when the needle lands back on the vinyl wall after a bounce/skip/surf, it does so with substantially increased force, resulting in a "splash" (to continue the surfing metaphore" - which is permanent damage to the vinyl track wall. - ANY mistracking, results in dramatically increased wear. Which brings me to stylus contact patch width... if the contact patch is too wide, it cannot fit in the smaller waves on the track wall which are the encoding of higher frequencies - so your typical conical stylus, doesn not only miss out on everything over 15khz... any part of the recording that includes material at those high frequencies will cause the stylus to mistrack... it cannot fit into those grooves, so it loses contact with the wall, and causes damage on regaining contact.
Playing a record with a basic conical stylus is a recipe for rapid an permanent wear.
So what about elipticals - well, the better elipticals can indeed track the high frequencies... eliminating much of the mistracking wear... but take a look at the contact patch factor...
Contact Patch - so as mentioned above VTF is a direct wear factor (and the easiest one to understand intuitively) - ultimately the wear is proportional to the pressure applied per surface area at the contact patch. Wear can be reduced by reducing VTF (as long as mistracking does not set in... see mistracking above) - or it can be achieved by expanding the contact surface area - ie: spread the VTF over a larger surface area.
How do we do that? - simply expanding the contact patch will result in mistracking as it gets wider and is unable to fit between the higher frequency corrugations of the vinyl.... so we need to seperate the horizontal width of the contact patch, from the vertical height of the contact patch - what we need is a long vertical contact patch, with a very narrow horizontal width. That then allows the contact patch to maintain contact with the groove at high frequencies due to the narrow horizontal width, and spread the VTF over a larger surface area due to the extended vertical length of the contact patch.
This is what is achieved using microline, shibata, and other similar complex needle shapes.... long narrow contact patch.
Elipticals have the narrow horizontal contact patch, but their vertical length is about the same as the conical... so they often have a smaller contact patch than a conical does - reduced wear due to reduced mistracking, but increased wear due to increased VTF per area...
Swings and roundabouts - a good low VTF (high compliance) eliptical with a matching low mass arm, will achieve decent wear performance.
But wear can be reduced by a couple of orders of magnitude by moving to a line contact needle type in the same situation...
as an aside, keep in mind that higher wear levels apply to both the needle and the vinyl... a line contact needle will have a lifetime of 3 to 5 times the playing hours of an eliptical or conical stylus... (we can discuss the definition of "lifetime" - I believe Jico use the measure of distortion increasing to beyond 3%... from memory)
Cleanliness....
You want to reduce wear... make sure the record is clean! grit and dust in the track will increase wear to needle and vinyl by an order of magnitude.
Lubrication.
Yes, the vinyl surface can be lubricated which improves performance, reduces wear and increases needle life. Products include guvglide, Last record treatment (with fomblin lubricant... google it), or DIY solutions such as Armorall.
If you want to reduce wear on both vinyl and needle, and you want to reproduce what is encoded into the groove, as perfectly as possible, you have to go with a high compliance, low VTF cartridge and stylus, mounted in a low mass arm (preferably with damping) - this handles the mechanical aspects... then you need custom loading/EQ to achieve a flat/neutral frequency response, and a quality phono pre, which can handle the dynamic peaks generated not so much by the music but by the flaws in viny, the clicks and pops... so although the music may be limited to 60db to 80db dynamic range, the requirements for the phono pre, are ideally somewhere over 120db.
and this is where we start hitting limitations in our available audio technology - whether analogue or digital, achieving that dynamic range is tricky.