I have a Miele Excella and I never use the starch feature. I use normal about 75% of the time, pots and pans 25%. I scrape off food chunks, but I rarely rinse dried on pasta or rice. The dishes come out clean, it's amazing.

I DO rinse off ketchup and excess tomato sauce, though. One time I did not rinse a bowl that had tomato sauce in it and my white plastic items turned a light pinkish-orange (temporarily).

Sticky rice......is the Mexican, Chinese,...?
I use the Pots & Pans cycle most of the time (as we do a lot of cooking) and everything baked-on the pots, and cheese that is bake-on glass casserole containers are clean. So far the Miele Diamante is the only unit I've owned that has been able to clean those effectively.

Here is what the La Perla user manual says about the Cheese/Starch mode:
For dishware with dried on starchy or cheesy food; 120% detergent recommended. It does 1 pre-rinse, 1 main wash, 1 interim rinse, and 1 final rinse.

And Here is what both the La Perla (and my Diamante) say about the Pots & Pans mode:
For normally soiled pots & pans with dried on food, and heavily soiled dishware, use 120% detergent recommended. It does 1 pre-rinse, 1 main wash, 1 interim rinse, and 1 final rinse.

When I have used the Pots/Pans mode, I checked the times, the 1st pre-rinse is 5 minutes, the main wash is 60 minutes, and the interim rinse is 20 minutes, and the final rinse is 30. So total time is about 2 hours. For the normal mode, it does 2 pre-rinses (15 min each), 1 wash (45 min), and a final rinse (30 min). So that's 1hr 45min total for the normal mode. But like I said, we prefer to use the pots/pans as it has the longer 60 min wash, and has two rinses at the end.

The main point here, and to answer your question, is that the pots/pans mode and the cheese/starch mode both run the same cycles and say to use 120% of detergent (or 20% more than what you'd use on normal). The only thing I'm not sure if that if the cheese/starch has different run-times for each cycle, or if the temperature is different.
In all honesty, If someone did a side-by-side test using the pots/pans mode on a Diamante or Optima, and the cheese/starch mode on a La Perla, I'd bet that both would turn out the same.

Okay, I just got off the phone with Miele, and they told me that the pots & pans mode and cheese/starch mode use the same temperature and have the same cycles. The only difference is that the cheese/starch program washes for 20 minutes longer.

With it in mind that the La Perla has a setting that is "stronger" than the standard pots & pans mode, and that Miele probably has a reason for creating this mode, I'm wondering how often the pots & pans mode is ineffective in getting all the food off very difficult items.

About how often do you end up with difficult food that hasn't been compeletely removed from your dishes?

See my above post, using the Pots/Pans mode I've never had any food left on any dishes or pans. The same thing could be said when using the Normal mode.