Yeah, Aaron, that was my understanding too until recently. As I have been reading, I learned that it seems that your maximum sharpness is somewhere in the middle range of aperture… say 2 stops less than wide open to about f8. Apertures smaller than this achieve large DOF, but the image quality may suffer due to diffraction.
It seems to me, from what I have read so far, that the maximum sharpness with maximum DOF, would be achieved by using the best part of a particular lens, say f 5.6 – 8.0 set at the hyperfocal distance (you may be able to go larger aperture with a 2.8 lens?) But all of this is what I am still trying to resolve in practice.