I'm not looking for a stainless steel, and I wanted something a bit better then O-1. I've heard good things about the 3V/10V steels, as well as A-2 and L-6. Why would 10V be unsuitable for a larger (6in or so) knife? Why are those steels so far apart?
They are all carbon steels, but they have different compositions and properties.
At one extreme, you have L6, which is very tough and ductile, but has very little corrosion resistance.
In the middle, A2 is optimal at a fairly high hardness, with decent toughness, and better stain resistance and wear resistance than L6.
On the other end, CPM-10V has very little ductility, is usually run at high hardness, and has lots of hard carbides(10V=10% Vanadium) for extremely high wear resistance.
No reason you can't have a great knife made from any of the three, but it's like a list of optimal steels for three different knives, like L6 for a big chopper, A2 for a medium sized "jack of all trades", and 10V for a small knife that does a lot of cutting.
Plenty of large knives have been made in A2, too, and of course it and L6 can be used for smaller knives(my grandmother still uses L6 knives of various sizes in the kitchen that my great-grandfather made during the Depression, and look at how popular the various sizes of Bark River knives in A2 are), but I wouldn't expect 10V to take heavy impacts. 10V is supposed to have similar toughness to M2 and D2, but higher wear resistance.
Hope that helps.
