It's been my experience that you get the most information about failure modes from the subtle damage that results from more moderate testing. That's one reason I like my 8d nail cutting test. It's not a very rigorous test of steel strength or toughness at all, just hammering an edge through the nail resting on a piece of wood, but it shows how the steel will fail when it is does. Will it chip? Will it deform? Is the edge more likely to crack or roll? In most cases, such damage as there is can be sharpened out so you're not trashing a knife to find out what it's made of and how it's likely to fail. Something to be said for that. If you do this on a couple knives of diverse quality you can see something of how the results will reflect the differences - or not.
I do another nail test that I've performed at least twice on every steel I use. All steels fail this test; it's definitely destructive or it's not done right. I hammer an 8d common bright nail (Home Depot) into a board, bend it to 45 degrees, then try to cut the nail in half by chopping straight down on the bottom half of the angled nail. The lateral stresses this induces are huge. The edge will either bend beyond usefulness or it will pop out a nice round chunk. How and which of those failure modes occur tells me a lot about the steel.
There's something you need to understand about these tests. These are MY tests, and I know about how much force I use on the chop; I know how heavy the edge is on the knife; I know everything there is to know about the knife: and I know what the same conditions have produced with other knives and other steels in my hands, in my shop. The is no comparative standard beyond me and my shop in any of these tests. But it tells me how that knife edge compares with other knife edges under conditions I know and control. You have absolutely no way of reproducing my test conditions; you can only establish your own with your own hand speed, muscle mass, and sense of fairplay.
Once an edge is damaged beyond all recognition, it's almost impossible to attribute failure to a single source. If there were a single chip in an edge and you hammered on the tang until the blade broke, whether it broke at the chip location or elsewhere would tell you something about how it broke, but even then you'd have to be dead certain your hammer blows were square to the tang surface, or you'd never be able to guess the amount of torsional stress you induced and where it acted upon the edge. What is the cross-sectional area of the blade that resists rotational stress or lateral bending? Is the difference between the CRK and the Strider just that? You can never know that this test was identical to the test that broke or didn't break another blade you tested months ago, IMO.
Maybe the best test you can use is the test of consumer experience. Forget all the experts. How many people have good experience with this knife, this steel, this kind of edge, this company? This and other forums might be the best indicators of quality, but even then you'll have people clamoring about how great this is that knife is because it is popular to do so, OR it's a knife they own and want their choice to be viewed as sound.
It's tough. Do your own tests. Chop hard wood, cut nails, do anything you want that doesn't destroy the knife and see what happens. Compare results between a couple knives you own and form your own opinion of what's best in the blades you want to use. Try to make everything as consistent as you can and be honest with your assessments. Try for forget that the $300 knife should perform better than the $100 knife, and try to remember there are more qualities to a knife than just how well it chops nails or anything else. Just look at the results and nothing else. Stainless is important to some, so don't try to convince someone, yourself included, who wants stainless to believe that stainless steels are inferior. Some people only want knives in tool steels so don't screw around with stainless because you'll never see anything you like there.
Just try it. See how little damage you can do to an edge in any manner you choose, then see if that same action damages another edge. This is the window in which we operate with our knives, using them as tools not by beating them to death. You'll learn something and still have a useful tool after you resharpen it. And try to forget its potential as your last life saving piton while you're scaling Everest, or that you'll ever use it to build a log (or concrete block) cabin for your family to make it through an artic winter. Be real. I spent a lot of time in the jungle and never needed anything better than an $18 Ontario machete. (Actually I think they were more like $8 back then.)
This really can be fun.
