Somewhere we're using wildly different views of how a bend test is performed. From most points of view thickness is extremely important in the angle to which an item can be bent. For example old .02" thick alarm clock springs could be wound into 1 inch diameter circles while .1" thick springs I've made for a radio telescopes were used in 5 foot diameter applications.
A metal exceeds its elastic limit (takes a set) when part of the metal exceeds a certain PSI of stress. This happens when it is locally stretched more than a certain percentage. When you bend something the most highly stretched region is on the outside of your bending curve. The thicker the material the more the outer surface is stressed (given a fixed bending radius).
The angle of bend is meaningless if you don't control your radius of curvature or the length of your sample. For example I could take a piece of window glass that was 10 feet long and bend it a few degrees without breaking. If you work with a 6" piece of glass you would say that it couldn't be bent at all.
I say that if you take 6" samples of any steel and put 1" in a vice and apply pending moment sideways you will find that the blade takes a set or fails at a smaller angle for a thick blade than a thin blade. The thick blade will take much higher pressure to get there, but the angles of the failures will be lower for thicker materials. (All this assumes same alloys and heat treatments).
Most of the time we are not concerned about the angles achieved before blade failure, only force. If I'm prying with a blade with 100 pounds of force on the handle I won't notice whether it deflects 3 degrees or 5 degrees, just whether the blade ends up bent or broken. That is the reason that thicker is almost universally better for prying type forces. If you make a filleting knife you want thin blades to easily flex to follow bones. Even here you aren't as concerned about the angle of deflection before failure, just the ease of getting a small deflection. Here thin is better because it gives you a lower spring constant (fewer pounds required per inch of deflection).
Anyway, you can bend a thin blade at a tighter angle than a thick blade, but you probably don't care. If you want to do apples-to-apples bending comparisons use the same thickness of material and the same lengths.
