In my opinion, the leading production companies tend to be Spyderco, Benchmade and Kershaw. Lots of companies produce one or two hits, maybe even at the same time, but these three can have a dozen hits out simultaneously, and generally dictate the future of knives for other companies to emulate down the road.
I think the leader of those three flip flops every so often, but having given a very hard look at the industry this last month, I'd have to say Kershaw is the current overall leader. Kershaw's relatively recent love affair with high-tech steel gives you some very high end stuff at very reasonable prices. I'm enjoying a MIM blade right now, as far as I know, the only MIM model ever made. But you can get beautiful composite blades too, damascus, ZDP, D2, you name it, they got it.
Where Kershaw is consistently a big hit with me is with KO designs. I've consistently loved KO's designs, custom and production, but that's my own personal stylistic preferences. Also, I really like flippers--not just for getting the blade out, I think they're an important safety feature (like finger choils) as a failsafe in lock failures (or as a finger guard for you SD people). Also, I tend to love crazy steels designs, like damascus and so on, which cost between 600-2000 dollars from Benchmade, doesn't exist from Spyderco (new model coming soon, actually, with damascus) but is easily available from Kershaw, as well as all those other neat steels I mentioned.
Where Kershaw falls down a little for me is that they are so dedicated to assisted opening (they seem to be distancing themselves from that with their non KO models though), which is fine, it's just not my preference, and also that they are pretty dedicated to coated blades, like pretty much the entire ZT line, virtually all the spec bumps, all the offsets and so on.
Anyway, terrific company, can't go wrong with them.
