Wait, so what ended up happening with the book? My old club had a whole blowup over this same thing. One woman picked a 900 page doorstop for our December pick (in December! the busiest month!) and half of us gave up around page 50 and just showed up for the wine and snacks. The other half acted like we'd spit on her grandma. We ended up switching to a rule where any book under 300 pages gets a free pass for the first month, and honestly it saved the group.

Are you sure it was the hinges and not just the odds catching up with you? Two bad jobs with cheap hinges and one good job with Blum is a pretty small sample size. A lot of the slamming complaints I have seen come down to install, not the hardware. If the doors are hung out of square or the strikes are off, even nice hinges will let a door swing and bang. I have used cheap hinges on plenty of jobs with zero callbacks, and the trick was shimming and planing, not brand loyalty. Blum is good stuff, no question, but blaming the hinges for a crooked face frame is a little like blaming the tires for a bad alignment. Maybe the third kitchen just went smoother because you had two jobs of practice under your belt.