Pull-through sharpener or learn on stones when I own six knives and no patience

Mild disagreement, in the interest of not overspending. Nothing is wrong with a cheap pull-through for the three cheap knives in the drawer. They are soft, they will never hold much of an edge whatever you do, and the scratches do not matter on a knife you bought as a set. Keep the pull-through for those, and use a proper method on the two German knives and the gyuto. Buying a guided system to sharpen a drawer knife is like taking a hire car to a specialist.

A guided system is the honest answer for someone who wants results without a skill. You clamp the knife, the rod holds the angle, and your first attempt is repeatable in a way that a freehand beginner's fifth attempt often is not. It is slower per knife than a pull-through and far better, and unlike freehand you do not need to maintain the skill between sessions. Four times a year is exactly the frequency at which freehand skill decays between uses.

I own a carbide pull-through, a guided system and stones, which is embarrassing but does mean I can compare on the same knife. On a cheap stamped knife the pull-through takes about thirty seconds and gives you an edge that cuts a tomato and lasts perhaps a fortnight. It also visibly scratches the bevel and removes far more metal than it needs to, because those carbide teeth are scraping rather than abrading.

The guided system takes maybe ten minutes a knife and gives an edge that is genuinely sharp and lasts months. The stones take me about the same ten minutes now but took an hour and produced worse results for my first year. For six knives four times a year, the guided system is the one I would keep if I had to bin the other two.

The middle option nobody mentions is paying someone. Four times a year, six knives, dropped off at a shop or a market stall that does it properly. If you genuinely do not want the hobby, that is a defensible answer, and it is what I did for three years before I got curious. Just ask what they sharpen on, because some places use a belt grinder that gets hot and some use water cooled wheels, and it is worth knowing which.

I put a Japanese knife through a carbide pull-through exactly once, before I knew any better, and took two visible chips out of the edge along with a set of scratches. Grinding those out cost me a lot of blade height and an afternoon on a coarse stone, and the knife has a slightly different profile to this day. It was a present. If you take nothing else from this thread: hard thin steel and carbide scrapers do not mix.

Guided system for the good knives, pull-through for the drawer knives, stones only if you discover you enjoy it. Four times a year is not enough repetition to build freehand skill.