Everything in LF is a trade off. If you open up too far you have shallow DOF. If you stop down too far you soften the image through diffraction. Etc. The bottom line as you'll find eventually, is to artfully walk all the trade offs.
What many people have learned before us is that while diffraction limiting makes the entire image slightly softer, DOF works more like a gradient -- sharpness varies across the image. We see the variation in sharpness fairly easily since our visual systems are excellent with patterns.
This is at least partly why the pioneers like Weston, Adams, Cunningham, etc. who founded
Group f.64 chose that name. They valued over all focus. That is, they were willing to give up a little entire image softness to get more entire image DOF.
How you personally feel about it is of course easy to test -- all you need do is make a number of identical exposures using different f-stops. Make prints from each, put them up on your "viewing wall" side by side and see what you think. The more enlargement of course, the easier it is to see, which of course points you to another consideration. And there are many more considerations out there.
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