As I have posted in the past, my preference is for more durable, stronger knives. This is based on more than 40 years of outdoor experience in difficult environments and performing difficult tasks. The old Kabar was not strong enough for me, and I have broken and bent many of them. The hand made knives I own get used in the woods, and sometimes carried in high threat environments. They are tools, and they get abused.
We should get together sometime and swap yarns because with fairly long times in the outdoors (between you and me we have logged more than a century of healthy outdoor living), but our tool preferences are quite different, quite possibly representing civilian vs. military situations.
I like small knives, SAKs, multitools, or Moras. My most arduous and potentially "dangerous" assignments were responding to wild land fires. Then I carried a good sharp shovel and an ax variant, a Pulaski (ax blade married with a grub hoe - quite versatile). I still have all my appendages. Recreationally, I have been a backpacker and climber (often on technical routes) and in those environments when one uses a knife, it is used with great care, mostly to open a can of beans. From time to time doing SAR, I carried an Estwing hatchet, used primarily to clean out a helispot or swamp brush from a trail in advance of a stretcher party. I think the biggest knife any of us carried was a Buck 110.
It is good that there are different tools for different situations. It is interesting to learn that a Kabar is not all that strong....
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