Occy, “… we would like to stop safely before the end of the runway”, exactly, and this should always be the first priority.
Intruder, the primary objective of professionalism is safety, then optimisation might be considered. “People are expected to be both efficient and thorough at the same time – or rather to be thorough, when with hindsight it was wrong to be efficient.” (E. Hollnagel
page 6)
One of the Boeing documents (decurion #5) is at
SmartCockpit - Airline training guides, Aviation, Operations, Safety - flight ops, flying technique, “landing on slippery runways”; this shows the contribution of bakes / rev for a range of runway conditons.
T.M. your last para (#1) covers the majority of the issues. Logic suggests that the crew should decide which would be the better option (brakes/rev) for each landing – maximizing efficiency – as per manufacturers’ recommendations.
However, safety evidence suggests that pilots don’t always understand the circumstances, and in many instances critical information on the runway condition is sparse or incorrect – at the expense of thoroughness (safety). Thus many companies mandate the use of autobrake (changing from the manufacturers’ recommendation), but some, without providing supportive guidance, e.g. A/B setting for reported runway conditions, matching A/B setting with % of landing wt, need for reverse.
Without guidance or even with it and poor assessment, many landings can be made with inadequate landing distance safety margin, and I suspect that many pilots have relied on reverse to save embarrassment.
Some company attitudes towards the use of autobrake, and weak or misapplied knowledge, might be contributing to the many overrun accidents.