As most of the regulars know I work with a lot of whitewoods. Pines mostly that come from pallets and what not.
I recently made a workbench from an old door but it was hollow inside so I plan on moving it to a lower level and replacing the top with something more solid. Given my availability of 2x4's it would be really easy for me to laminate those and plane the top to make a nice bench top.
There are enough people on the "pine /softwoods are terrible for this" bandwagon but I found a blog post from Paul Sellers that comes to their defence for me.
I have made benches in the US from every species of softwood with not issues of serviceability.
So a good question for here would be are softwoods suitable or practicable for use as bench tops?