I wanted to add a recent Artisan Cutlery experience which sort of counterbalances my praise earlier in this thread.
My Mini Proponent seemed fine at first: excellent action, nice fit and finish, no blade play, etc. It had extremely early lockup -- as in, "Is that actually locked up?" -- but felt solid and couldn't be forced shut, and I figured it just needed a bit of breaking in.
But after a week or so I found that anything other than a hard snap open would cause it to lock up unsafely, with just a hair of contact between lockbar and tang. I could easily close the knife without disengaging the lock. At that point I was past being able to return the knife (carried, used, Sharpie on the tang), so I disassembled it.
The proprietary pivot screw (which I don't like aesthetically; it's much too close to a swastika) is a real pain. The female side is D-shaped, which is great, but the male side has to be unscrewed using the slots in the logo. By the time I got it out, my pivot was scratched up and there were little metal shavings everywhere. This is a poor design, IMO.
Several of the screws were covered in junk -- not thread locker, as far as I could tell. Just...stuff. Try as I might, I couldn't get the standoff screws to go back into their holes, even with pliers gripping the standoff and me bearing down full-strength on the screw (never awesome with a T6...). I literally couldn't put the knife back together, so this was the point where I wrote it off as unsalvageable.
I've disassembled my share of knives (I could have fully serviced two Emersons in the time it took me to fail to service this knife...), but perhaps someone with more experience could have made this mess work. This could also just be my particular example -- maybe I got a lemon, who knows.
But based on this experience I'm going to be more cautious about buying more Artisan knives.