So long as it's properly laced and tensioned, it doesn't matter if a man did it or a machine did it. At the same time, it's not like there's some absurd cost that prevents us from buying handbuilt wheels. I have 6 bikes in my shop, and five them are on handbuilt wheels.

And as I've said what feels like a zillion times, rating a component based on it's life in years in kinda meaningless-- you could have a wheel from 1978 that's been hanging in a garage for 40 years. The hand-built front wheel on my Ritchey has 22,000 miles on it. Never been touched.