EChoil Makes sense since you don't really have much to just put the tip on to cut against.
From what I've read about the way NASA buys stuff its more a matter of someone seeing a thing, it fitting a need, and it meeting the approvals. an amazing amount of stuff there is off the shelf.
As far as carry, astronauts get to carry pretty well what they want, within weight limits, of course. But a lot of gear that goes up, just stays up. Not much point bringing it back if you might need it. Someone probably figured, the SAK is nice, but we need a one-hand opener for some things, and given how NASA is populated with air force guys, its probably something a lot of them were already familiar with from their air-flight times. If the spec-war was in circulation with the SERE instructors, its what would be familiar to a lot of pilots. And to them that familiarity matters a lot, there might be better, but when someone (not an astronaut, probably whoever got the job of packing the survival kits) is looking down a list of all the stuff that is approved for procurement, they don't have time to bring in 50 samples. Outgassing of plastics is more critical than almost anything else to them. And maybe it just looked cool.
From what I understand NASA pretty often gets stuff in the 10s and 20s, I think the original Vic was a couple hundred units because that's what Vic was willing to do, and they were sort of part of the whole program which was supposed to be much bigger. The are constantly evaluating stuff, but its often companies trying to get things into the program, not necessarily trying to fill a critical role. They were much more pedantic about that back in the Gemini days, but it was a far more military mindset back then, now its up to the engineers.
