Am I just blowin steam cos I've had a few beers or do others think the same way ?
Fair enough, while I'm tokin' this here's my 2cents.
I think it depends on fitness and the clue trail.
I'd be as disenchanted to find a machete tuned to a thin razor edge as I would to find a small caper that came obtuse. Neither are suitable for purpose.
Then there's what Marion touched with bad for you, or bad for everyone:
To me that reads as who's purpose and style of using. Lobster crackers tend to be heavy and obtuse because of the way they are used by most people who buy them. It's beyond excepted it is welcomed. I couldn't in all good conscience buy one for use as a general kitchen knife and then bitch about having to do a lot of work on it because it doesn't cut very well. The tool just isn't fit for fine cutting tasks so reject it with no ill will or expect a bunch of work. Similarly, I have small German kitchen knives that I've taken to such acute convexes they are near the limit of what the metal will support. In the hands of someone using them how they are commonly used they are too extreme and would probably collapse. They'd do better with the factory stock edge that I despise. In sum, they are just bad for me at stock. Again, no ill will, reject it or do the work. Key to unraveling this for me is that the goods are of merchantable quality. They are fit for purpose, the common purpose, but not necessarily my purpose.
In contrast, there are vendors that try to manipulate that common purpose thing and I will reject those with malice. Few people would buy something like say a car, find it doesn't work very well at what cars are commonly used for, and then allow themselves to be happily fobbed off with... and if you go to some corner of t'internet you'll find this level of crap performance at common tasks is actually all the rage...you just don't get it...but hey, if you want it to simply get you from your house to the shops there are loads of after market bits you can add on and some top notch mechanics out there that can make it do that for you.... Seems some people will buy knives like that though. I like knives. I find knives special. But they aren't so special to me that normal reasoning rules don't apply. They have no magickal properties. A car that drives like a wheelbarrow or its on caterpillar tracks is a pretty lousy example of a car even if by some rouge chance that is exactly the kind of car I'm looking for.
It's a niche monster, [mmm, a kinda sharpened pry bar but not a knife]. Similarly, a knife that levers, pounds and mashes well but cuts badly is a poor offering of a knife even if by some weird quirk a knife that works best as a hammer is exactly what I was looking for. This strikes me as the exact opposite of the scenario in the paragraph above. In that description it is the operator that is the oddity and not the tool. The tool is fit for the commonly expected purpose even though it may not be yours. In this case it is the tool that is the oddity and not fit for common purpose, not the user that thought they'd bought a knife.
I find it hard to make clear distinctions as to which to put on which pile in many cases. Knives are subtle and the boundaries can be blurred. Sometimes it doesn't take much to take two identical ones and make one a good cutter and the other one lousy. That isn't going to help with the is it me or is it it quandary. Yet with others it is glaringly obvious it isn't you. This is where the clue trail comes in. Are those same people telling you that knife X is supposed to be not so great at cutting closer to the body of knowledge we can draw from chefs in the real world in relation to lobster crackers? Or are they more akin to a little sample on the t'internet comprised of marketers, shills, friends, relatives and non-military military groupies selling you a hype knife? Personally, if I bought a car that drove like a golf cart I'd be looking to the real world and what kinds of things are commonly expected from cars. The last thing I would be doing would be driving over to the golf course in the pathetic offering so I could feel the warm round of applause from golf fanatics.
I also take into account other motives for the knife ending up at me the way it does. Did the maker stick that edge on that lobster cracker because that was what is required? Or did they simply do it serve their own ends whilst marketing some aspect - here's a bit of A2 you can chop bricks with or your money back...sod that it won't cut...we can put a spin on that...we'll just play up the super industrial strength aspect and no one will notice.
The last piece in my puzzle is what I envisage a company really feels about what it produces in its own heart of hearts so to speak. Because I've never seen any evidence of companies such as Moki, Hattori, I O Shen, Fällkniven .etc delivering anything but impeccable products one that came not quite as it ought to be would get the benefit of the doubt. I'd treat that as rogue, and I'd prefer to think that the seller would feel somewhat embarrassed about the defect. Yet others sound the alarm bells of really not GAS. Truly disgusting degrees of finish explained away under a coat of thick drain paint Not just machine a few minor machine marks but deep pits, scratches and gouges lead me to suspect that company truly doesn't care despite what they claim. They're just selling stuff. Dub on a shoddy edge and there's a knife I wouldn't touch with a stick at any price. Although my antipathy grows the more audacious such a company gets with the asking price. Some are flat out taking the piss, and I'd rather give the money to The Dogs Trust. No regrets. No excuses.
Ho Hum.
) batoning. I pair it up with a thin edged folder or small fixed blade for the smaller tasks, food prep, fuzzies etc. As such, i want an edge that can handle heavy chopping, splitting etc. Factory edge was just fine for that,later i convexed it slightly. 
