I will have to admit to having a sevier lothing of "tactical" knives, but for reasons that may be very different from what you may think.
Having spent the 2d half of my life as a machinist, and the last 10 years of that trade getting more familiar with CNC machine/manufacture techniques, and CAD/CAM engineering linked into that, I'm cursed. Cursed in that its hard for me to pick up something, and see how it was made, and then swallow the huge amount of hype and B.S. in capital letters, justifieing the price tag on them. In my very humble opinion, the "tactical" knife is just one of the most blatent rip offs on the market.
They may be tough, they may be good cutting tools in some circumstances, but I would never in this life stoop to carrying one. They are engineered from the ground up to be a cheap knife to produce. Any other quality they may have is a by-product. They are made possable by the break through in machine technology that occured in the late 1980's and early 1990's. I witnessed this myself as I was in the trade. To someone outside of the machine trade, it would seem very high tech and easy to swallow the bunk that the makers of these knives put out. But once you see a Takaswa machining center in full swing, and what it's capable of doing, you'd be amazed. I've seen it make a large chasis for a comunication device that had many recessed pockets for componants, milled slots, tapped holes in 2-56, 4-40, 6-32, counter bored holes, counter sunk holes, in 12 and 1/2 minutes. The same part on a standard Bridgeport mill would take a good machinist most of a day to complete. The speed of manufacture of cnc parts is unreal. The new generation of machines are capable of runing at 15 to 20 thousand RPM, and with constant coolent flow cuts out parts in sometimes seconds.
Where I worked at the Watkins-Johnson company in Gaithersburg Maryland, we had the engineering dept. on the second floor. They were tied right in to the cnc machines in the model shop on the first floor. When the cad/cam computer models were done, the program was fed right into the mdel shop Takaswa and Harding machines. If there was an error in the first prototype then the program was corrected, and the second was right. From there it went into production.
Now against this backdrop, we have the tactical knife. One single stamped out blade, ground to shape on automatic machines, tumble or bead blasted finished. Handle parts stamped or water jet cut if metal, injection molded if zytel. Either way, a prosses that yields many, many, many, parts an hour. Same thing for any liner material. Automatic machinery taps the holes that are going to be used for the assembly. The parts move to the line where some workers with more high speed machines put the parts together with allen or torx screws. You now have a finished knife that with all the hype is going to sell for more than a four or six blade Swiss army knife or three blade stockman. How much does a nice stockman or trapper from queen go for? With satin or polished blades, cocobolo or bone handles, nickle silver pins set by an experianced cutler and his hammer, as are the krinked blades.
If Case, an American company in an American city can make a traditional pocket knife, with all the hand operations required, with natural materials like jigged bone in just about any shade you want, brass liners, nickle silver bolsters, for 40 bucks, why is a tactical knife with stamped out parts, cnc parts, and screwed together by semi-skilled labor going for sometimes more than twice that amount? The man hours of labor on a tactical is a very small fraction of the traditional. The cost of materials is a fraction of the cost of the traditional. Plastic and stainless steel sheet stock vs brass, nickle silver and cocobolo (or stag, bone, walnut, ...).
So with cheaper materials, cheaper labor cost, where do Spyderco, Benchmade, and dare I say the name, Dork Opps, get off with the prices they charge? Oh I've heard the argument that they have R&D costs. People, this ain't rocket science! Its a knife! With the right people in the design and engineer dept, starting in the morning, you can have a design on the screen by lunch, and by close of buissness have it downloaded to the model shop computer by end of day. By first coffee break the next morning the first parts of the prototypes should be comming off the machines. Like I said, you'r designing a 5 or 6 piece knife, not a new space shuttle. The big differences I see in the tactical knives is they try to come up with something new to keep feeding the atificial market they have created. So they design all kinds of insane swoops and angles in the blade. Concave edges, convex edges, tanto points, even more extreme tantp points, different kind of serrations, blood grooves for contol of blood spray durring "covert de-animation" and other such nonsence and hype.
So I guess you can say I hate tactical knives because they are cheap to produce knife with a much higher price tag than is ethical, designed to reap a very high profit margin for the companies that make them. They are hyped by the knife magazines as the best thing in knives since the flint blade, fueling a market driven by gulable young men who swallow that stuff.
As I stated once before, tools evolve to the needs. If we look back to the past to see what blades people used to depend on in thier everyday life to do the job they had, or even to defend thier life with, you saw nothing in any way that resembled a tactical knife. If someone needed a good knife, sometimes in a hurry, look to the 1700s sailor on a square rigged ship. or a 1800s mountain man who just fired his one shot from his Hawken, or a trail hand pushing a bunch of longhorns up to the railhead in Kansas. Or even in modern times, the regular grunt in Viet Nam, a Cheasapeake bay waterman or New England lobsterman. Theres not many hard working folks I know that are going to spend the high price they ask for these tactical things. The tactical knife is a solution to a problem that does not exist. It did not evolve, it was created for a financial reason.
On the other hand P.T. Barnum said there was a sucker born every minute. So be it, let them spend thier money on what they want, no matter. But it will be a very chilly day in the niether world when I buy a single blade plastic handle, scwed together knife for more money than I can buy a two or three bladed knife made out of far more attractive materials, and giving me far more versitility. I can't help it, its my pragmatic attitude.
If Victorinox can build a 12 blade, 20 function knife, ship it to America, pay import duty, pay trasport to distribute, and STILL sell it for 39.95, and Spyderco sells a single blade plastic handle knife for the same or more, something is wrong. But then Opinel makes a WOOD handle single blade knife, ships it to the U.S., pays import duty, trasports and then sells it for 10 frigging dollars.
In the end it's all a matter of perspective. To me the tactical knife is to knives, what the M3 greese gun is to guns. Ugly, stamped out, it will work, but I don't have to like it.
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hopefully by next week sometime I'll have coughed up the dough, and the patience to wait for, a yellow carbon steel sodbuster (locking or not, I haven't decided yet)