I think your thinking along the same lines that I am. I'd like to see a non collectable knife. Sure the ETS ones now are nice but I wouldn't want to carry it around and get the pretty logo all scratched up. I want something I can carry around and use.
A lot of knife companies are sub contracting out work to small knife makers, latest one I was looking as is a buck hartsok (or something like that) which is Buck contracting the small guy to make a bunch of his knives for them. ETS could do that, find a smaller maker and have them make one of their models for ETS that otherwise would be unknown because of no marketing structure.