Well, as someone with over four decades of bag consumption, famous names and none, leather and not, I can only offer my own experience, which says that use or abuse of a bag counts more than even material and workmanship in terms of "lasting a lifetime."
You can order a bag hand made, as in the actual hands of one human being, of the finest leather, and if you abuse that bag, it is not going to last you a lifetime. And by abuse, I mean if you use it day in and day out for extended periods of time, like months, even years, on end, in all weathers, sling it, toss it, slam it and bang it around and rub it against all manner of surfaces and beings, let stuff get on it and never bother to wipe it off, leave lipstick with the top of the tube off in it, and leave it in the car on a hot day, etc, that bag is not going to last you any lifetime, and in a relatively short time it is going to look like a pile of warm poo.
And if you go to Target or Wal-Mart or the dude with the blanket on the sidewalk and get the cheapest, most machine-made, mass-produced unleather bag you can find, and you rotate it with a probably unecessarily large number of other bags, and avoid getting stuff spilled on it, handle it gently, don't sit it on dirty floors or squish it up against smelly bony people in crowded subways, wipe it off if it gets dusty or wet, keep the inside, if not actually clean, at least free from any moist or wet or waxy things, like smoked salmon or lipgloss, you will be able to pull that cheap bag out of the closet twenty or thirty years from date of purchase and it will not look significantly different.
Now I am not saying this to try to change anybody's mind about which bags are "better," but if you have a bag you like, whether it cost $2000 or $2, no matter what it is made of, nor by what processes, if you want it to last a long time and still look good,
take care of it!
Thanks for sharing. Makes me love my Ferragamo all the more.