Other than choppers, the common experience for the vast majority people is that they do not use a knife harshly enough to break it in their everyday use. But they do use it enough to dull it. Therefore edge retention is typically valued over toughness, and blade steels are typically evaluated by how long they hold an edge.
I agree with this. With the addition of geometry when possible. If I can choose between two different blades with the same edgeholding characteristics, I always prefer the one with thinner edge/blade stock.
It's all about matching the steel/heat treat/geometry with the desired function. For example, for many years I kept a stainless Opinel #8 in my lunch bag for cutting fruit, which I did every day with that knife. Fruit doesn't require an abrasion resistant steel, and the thin blade stock and thin edge of the Opinel make it a superb fruit cutter. Being easy to resharpen is frosting on the cake. The advantage of a tough steel is the ability to use thinner edges, which makes a big difference in perceived ease of cutting.
On the other hand, if I am going to do a lot of cutting in abrasive material, a high vanadium alloy is definitely a better choice. And a tough high vanadium steel is even better if the cutting of hard materials such as zip ties and other hard plastics is involved, or if regular contact with staples is a possibility. The very high abrasion resistance alloys such as Rex 121 might have chipping issues in that situation.
A few years ago, just for giggles, I did a head to head comparison of a number of knives cutting a variety of materials to simulate various EDC tasks. Cardboard, strapping tape, plastic jugs, and seasoned pine. Included were knives in S90V, S30V, Cruwear, XHP, K390, CPM-154, Rex 45, ZDP-189, Spy27, and Maxamet. It was a long test and my hand was completely exhausted afterward from all of the cutting. Perfect comparison would be difficult because of different geometries between the knives, but I did make an interesting observation. I tried to make sure that each knife had about the same edge angle and sharpness at the start. At first, my K390 Delica had much lower perceived force to cut compared to my S90V Native (most likely due to the thinner edge and blade stock on the Delica). The XHP Chaparral also performed quite well, again most likely due to the thin edge and blade stock. But as the test continued, the S90V Native caught up and in the end took noticeably less force to cut cardboard than the K390 Delica. I was surprised to see this, since the K390 Delica has the same vanadium content as the S90V Native, is a tougher steel, and is run at a higher Rc (which may have reduced the toughness advantage). There's something about S90V, at least from my experience. And XHP (Chaparral) and Cruwear (PM3) were not far behind, either. XHP was a real surprise because it doesn't have the high vanadium content of the others, yet it did really well, not just for perceived ease of cutting but in actual edge sharpness, and it did better than the S30V Buck Vantage I used for that test.
It should be noted that in that test I did more cutting with each knife than I typically do in a year of EDC, so I tend to gravitate to knives with good edgeholding and thin edge/blade stock when possible rather than just stick with S90V for everything.
