It's all very interesting, but there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. The existence of the teeth is well established. It's not the striationsbut the raised part next to it. The micrographs we saw were probably too close to see the striations. If you worked an edgw with a 8K stone, magnified 10,000x the spacing between striations would be 1.2 inches.

There is a old German story that razors should not be stropped right after shaving because it doesn't allow the teeth to return to their normal, nearly upright positions. Stropping would then force the teeth back, eventually causing them to break off from stress. This tells us that the teeth are elastically deformed when we shave and slowly return to some position short of being aligned. After that stropping probably causes additional elastic deformation as the teeth are stood up. This can go on for many shaves, and it does. Eventually, the blade pulls a little even after stropping. That's because of the slight frictional wear caused by shaving. All you need to do is a few touch up swipes on a Swaty and you're back to the original condition after you strop. As we know, this can go on indefinitely without major stropping.

So, with the normal routine, there should be no work hardening and no major honing required. That only happens if we do something out of the ordinary lkie, according to the Germans, always stropping right after you shave.

As for an edge improving after a few hone/strop cycles, that could just be a function of zeroing in an edge that's not quite there.