Quickly, down a list:
1: While I actually like the idea of pitdog doing it, I suggested tonym and big mike organizing a field test because there's a fair number of people out that way where the states are the size of small counties
Any other high concentration area would work. The important part is that a broad selection of hands and brains will lead to a much broader scoring opportunity. This is important for a number of reasons, including
2: Just having a winner is probably not enough. If it was a small head to head challenge in a single task, it would be easy. This is a broad area nad it makes sense to go the "reviewer route" and divide things up a bit:
Overall points winner, Chief tester 1(or team 1) fave, Chief tester 2(or team 2) fave, best in each category, and a couple or three wildcard slots (you get the testers together and come to a concensus on what those are after testing is done. That way if everyone feels a given knife was an overall winner even though the points total didn't indicate, you can get the judgement out there without having to muck with tallies).
2.5 Thing is, pretty much any of these knives, barring a catastrophic issue with material failure, is going to be SOMEONE's favorite. One of the reasons we don't all carry opinel #8s is that we
all like different things. To reflect that, you need a broad range of judgements- it's not like it costs anything extra, no one is minting sterling silver medals.
3: Then, once you've got all the tallies done, you can have a raffle, or a drawing, or a blanket trade, or straight up sell the blades. They will be used, but this is sounding like a regular usage testing setup, not a destruction or limit testing.
