Well, I clean the kitchen when my wife cooks, and vice versa. But she cooks most of the time, so I guess I'm your authority. Our hood does a great job with stovetop vapors, despite being in the island (harder to contain fumes than when against a wall), and doing a fair amount of frying in oil. The glass doors on the upper cabinets stay cleaner than I'd expected, maybe because they're so far from the cooking source. I go up and wipe them with glass cleaner once every 3 months or so, though they barely need it. There's a microwave now where the cookbooks are shown, with just half a dozen books remaining, but they're never dirty. Or maybe we use them often enough they don't have time to accumulate dust. I remember seeing Julia Child's kitchen at the Smithsonian -- she had shelves of books right there in her kitchen with no years of grease on their covers (unless the conservators have some cleaning solution to take the oil out of paper; I don't know their policy on restoration). It's the same with the items on the lowest of our upper shelves, not behind the glass doors: they hold the things we use on a daily basis, and few items sit around long enough to need dusting, though I'll give the shelves themselves an occasional wipe when I'm putting dishes away. I'm wondering if the kitchen residue you're referring to is the result of a 'circulating' or 'ventless' hood, which simply filters, or is supposed to filter, the vapors instead of exhausting them. Or perhaps a vented hood with a stuck vent flap, which I saw on one job.