Personally I find "super steel" to be yet another meaningless marketing buzzword. Materials can be optimized for various uses, there's no one best anything. I find that slipjoints with 1095 are easy to sharpen, take a great edge, and hold it through plenty of daily tasks. I maintain the blades on a Sharpmaker. I also have knives with CTS-XHP, D2, SR-101, 440A, 440C, S110V, S30V, CPM-M4, Aogami Super Blue, H1, 14C28N, 8Cr13MoV, 9Cr13MoV, and others. They all work fine for EDC. I don't even need a fancy lock.
One reason that high wear resistance steels aren't always the best choice is that dulling isn't always through slow wear. It can be through impact damage, chipping, etc, meaning high carbide fraction high wear resistance steels don't actually hold an edge longer but they require more work to restore the edge because sharpening on stones is slow wear. There's also apex stability to consider. Do you want a fillet knife or chefs knife with a thick edge and large inclusive edge angle? A thinner knife will cut better for most materials. All the testing I've seen shows that cutting performance increases as the edge angle decreases. The trick is to get it as low as possible without having it sustain damage. This is going to depend on the steel and the type of work involved. Doing this will increase cutting performance and edge retention.
There are too many variables to say steel A is always better than steel B. Cutting hemp rope doesn't show performance for anything other than cutting materials similar to hemp rope, for example. What about cutting fish? What about beef butchering? What if we need saltwater corrosion resistance? What if corrosion resistance is irrelevant but we need high apex stability for cutting soft, non-abrasive media? The best steel for cutting soft, non-abrasive materials is probably not the best steel for cutting hard, non-abrasive materials or soft, abrasive materials. Different alloys and heat treatments yield different material properties. Knowing what tasks you need to perform can help lead to choosing the most optimized steel for a given task. For most people on a day to day basis the choice of steel is most likely irrelevant and other factors about the knife will be more important. For me "super steel" means nothing. IMO it's better to try to talk in more concrete terms if we're really trying to discuss performance. YMMV and all that.
