Heath - As you may have noticed, there are almost as many sharpening methods as there are woodworkers. So I'm going step back from exactly what you should/shouldn't get for a minute and ask a few questions. I'll also note that there is no such thing as an idiot proof sharpening system - the idiots are way too skilled.:gar-Bi
The first, and highly important question, is "what do you want to sharpen?". If the answer is high-speed steel lathe tools, that's going to be a very different answer than if you want to sharpen traditional, european-style carving tools. Woodworking flat chisels and plane blades are yet another answer. For example, the scary-sharp sandpaper method is usable, but difficult, with traditional carving tools (the reason is that the sandpaper tears too easily). For lathe tools, waterstones would be the absolute pits - it would take forever.
And for flat chisels and plane blades, you can certainly use a jig and stones (oil or water), or sandpaper. However, this is the best choice only if you don't really care how long it takes you to do it. This answer is the same for the flat-grinding systems like the Worksharp (though far faster than doing it by hand). The reason is that all of these methods produce a flat bevel, which is not ideal on this type of tool. Far more efficient is a hollow-grind followed by honing on a very fine grit stone (the intermediate grits are not necessary and are actually harmful - more strokes means more chance of rounding a bevel).
The reason that a hollow grind is so efficient is that blade maintenance removes far, far less metal than a flat bevel system (only a micro-fine edge on the front, cutting edge, and the very back of the bevel is honed). It is also self-jigging in that the front and back of the grind touch the honing stone, providing a positive registration surface. In contrast, the flat-bevel method means that you must either a) perfectly duplicate the previous bevel angle to remove metal all the way up to the edge (which is required to get a sharp tool), or you must slightly increase the angle to make sure the front edge gets contacted. That garantees that the bevel will become more and more steep over several sharpening sessions, leading to the eventual situation that a plane will not cut because there's insufficient clearance angle, or a chisel will pare poorly and take a lot of force (higher cutting angle = more required cutting force).
To put together a hollow-grind system, you must have a wheel grinder (whether dry, wet, or hand-cranked) and a fine honing stone (or very fine, and somewhat expensive, sub-micron ceramic paper). In my particular case, I use a Tormek and an 8000 grit Japanese waterstone. You can, however, do just as well with a dry grinder (which is much, much less expensive), though you will have to train yourself to hollow-grind without excessively heating the blade and ruining the temper.
However, and this is the reason I offered the caveat of "what do you want to sharpen" at the first of the post, a hollow-grind system is very much not desirable for carving tools. In fact, a hollow grind on a traditional gouge will make it dang near unusable because unlike a plane blade or a flat chisel, the bevel itself is a jigging surface, and the hollow grind will make it "dive" in the wood.
Similarly, for lathe tools a water grinder and a honing stone would be unbelievably laborious - high speed steel in the tool is very, very hard and would take forever on a water-cooled grinder. This is why most experienced turners use a machine with both a dry grinding wheel and a grinding belt - the wheel for rough grinding, and the belt for finer grinding and removing the hollow bevel.
And, while I personally think powered sharpening of carving tools is a quick way to remove way too much metal, this particular area is where tools like the Worksharp and the Jool Tool shine - because they leave a flat bevel.
Finally, I should point out that sharpening is not the same as maintaining an edge tool. Hands down, the best method for maintaining any edge tool is a leather strop charged with honing compound, used manually. By eschewing power honers, you remove the biggest cause of having to take the tool back to the grinder - rounding the bevel. And with a strop, you can have a medium-dull plane blade that has otherwise been correctly ground and honed back to unbelievably sharp in 4 strokes - there is nothing faster, and there never will be.
