Convex works for me 'cos it does a bit of everything. It incorporates three things that I prize:
1] Flow. I strongly believe that what follows the cutting edge can be as important as the edge itself. The way whatever you have cut flows across the rest of the blade is not something I can ignore. I'm hoping one day someone with the facilities will examine this with ballistic gelatin and post up some photo illustrations.
2] Traditional way to make a strong edge that I have found nothing else to better.
3] By far the easiest for me to maintain.
Hollow grinds I've probably had more than anything else simply because they have been the most vogue and available over the course of my lifetime. For the most part I have moved away from them. For me they violate [1] Flow. That is important to me because with a utility field pattern I'm concerned just as much about how well a blade cuts through as I am just a sharp edge cutting. Move away from a utility pattern and well executed hollow grinds are acceptable to me. As far as I'm concerned I'd take a hunting pattern in a hollow grind but not an all round field knife. The closest thing I have at the moment is a little hollow ground Moki. It works great for taking critters apart and other shallow cutting but it isn't so good on whole blade disclosing things like onions, potatoes, apples. Poor flow makes it tend to try cracking them like a wedge rather than severing them. I've never encountered a hollow grind for which that isn't the case, and I don't see how it is possible. I do have a thin hollow ground Taylors somewhere that makes a fair stab at cutting through, but that is deceptive. It is just product of the thinness. Stick something else that thin in a more suitable grind against it and it is soon outed.
I've no time at all for the bushcraft bandwagon blades whether it be a Mora or TV prop Scandi knife. These represent the exact opposite of what I want in a field knife. The notion of flow just doesn't happen. They are whittling tools for edge cutting. I think they are great to send bundled with a copy of My First Little Basket in a christmas present for a child. Said child can then go off, and in the absence of genuine cutting chores, can sit and replicate something whittled. Better than throwing into a tree or whatever. I don't tend to that excuse to go cut something thing so they have no appeal. The last bit about what I said of hollow grinds also applies here. In particular I think it accounts for all those episodes of 'this Mora grind is so sharp it can make fuzz sticks'. I once commented here on what follows the cutting edge being the large part of that. I gave the example of a Stanley blade that one had quite deliberately blunted on a rock, that still makes fuzz sticks. Interestingly Scott Gossman agreed on this function of geometry. The larger heavier TV grade Scandis I see make no sense for me to carry. They've got to be the hardest of all to sharpen correctly in the field and excel at edge only stuff. If I thought I was likely to be bored out in the sticks rather than taking a book and an overbuild Scandi for whittling, I'd take the kind of small folding whittler than has been working for generations from Cowboys to contemporary gardeners and florists. That liberates my primary blade to concentrate on genuine work.
Flat grinds with convex edges, like a Laconico, seem like a good choice to me too. They are built to solve certain kinds of problems. This to me is the bottom line. Field knives to me require a really good ability to cut through because those are the kinds of tasks that present themselves in addition to cutting string, or pointing twigs, or dissecting something .etc. The Mears knife and similar come across as toys to me. The raison d'etre is that someone can rush off to the trees and play let's cut twigs up. My knives are not for that purpose, they are for solving real world tasks. As such they join hammering, sawing, chopping and so on as things that are incidental and not ends in themselves requiring their own specialist device.
I'm in a minority on this forum for thinking this way, and it is certain others will disagree, but this is where I'm at.
