10 hours ago, Rickbern said:It’s also the durability of the freshly sharpened edge that leads to opinions about different steels.
That's true ... but you have to be pretty good at sharpening to know if your edge retention issues are the result of the steel vs. your sharpening technique or geometry. It gets complicated.
High-alloy tool steels and super alloys can have lousy edge retention if you sharpen them to too acute an angle. They have terrible edge stability and will microchip. AND they're challenging to sharpen, because these steels were specifically designed to resist abrasion.
And some steels are tricky to deburr. They'll seem sharp straight off the stones, but dull very quickly. It's not intuitive that it's a technique problem, made worse by a quirk of the steel.
Edited to add: lots of restaurant cooks like the simple carbon steels that you like. They just sharpen after every shift.
