Yea I came to say the same but you said it more eloquently than I would have. Technically if you wanted to 100% retain the value you would only accept Gold.
Personally I only ever exclusively use credit. The biggest benefit of paying with credit is having the ability to easily reverse any and all erroneous transactions.
The biggest one for me was when I ordered some car parts online. They had a 100% moneyback guarantee that they would fit. The parts arrived, they didn't fit. When I went to return them they said "oh well you have to cover the cost of shipping them back." That's not 100% money back. I contacted my credit card company, they handled the problem and I kept the parts I didn't need and got all of my money back. Had I used a debit card I would have never gotten my money back.