Here's what I would say.
Chromium steels, aebl (and it's variants); xhp; and zdp, in order of high toughness low abrasion resistance to low toughness high abrasion resistance with xhp being balanced. All of these are very easy to sharpen and maintain. zdp in lower toughness applications, takes incredible edges, very easily at that, aside from chipping due to impacts it holds an edge like 10v but it sharpens more like vg10. Highly under rated and poorly understood imo. AEBL might be the goat all around steel. xhp is a great balanced profile chromium steel. It's got exceptionally good properties, better than you might suspect, considering it a chromium steel it holds it's own and even beat out some of the stainless vanadium steels in it's class in a lot of ways. Really good stuff.
I find that with Vanadium steels, including the stainless variants both the traditional ones and the newcomer, because of the maintenance profile which honestly requires non traditional abrasives to satisfy I find that the tradeoff isn't so straightforward, often times in many use cases you're better off going for the higher resistance variants. Once you cross that threshold of around 3 or 4% vanadium in a steel, you are in a different maintenance profile from "normal" chromium steels so there is no reason not to maximize that with a baseline ie for toughness in mind. IDK if I did a good job explaining that, but I'm sure others have had the same thoughts. In this realm, I think there are many great steels for many uses, obviously if corrosion isnt a major issue everything from 3v to 10v and maybe even beyond that have reasonable use cases. I really like a lot of things about magnacut too, it's very interesting in many ways, I like that it has really good toughness at high hardness, for instance at 64 rc it's about the same toughness as aebl with maybe twice the real world edge retention excellent stainlessness to boot. The one downside is course maintenance, it's going to be more difficult to machine, that could be grinding, sharpening, polishing, whatever, than any chromium steel. I'm looking forward to the future versions of it which are tweaked to have more/less in terms of toughness/abrasion balance. Considering how stainless it is and it's hardenability/toughness profile it's not hard to justify for normal folks who have to consider the lower machinability vs chromium steels. I still think s30v is about as good and well balanced of a steel as anyone would ever need for most "normal" knives. Beyond that, it's s90v that makes the most sense for the high resistance lower toughness variants unless for some reason you need the extra stainlessness associated with s110v. The variants of 10v all have their uses. For higher hardness you're better off with 10v, for lower hardness you're better off with Vanadis 8 because it will have more toughness, k390 is right in the middle.
Some of the high speed steels are interesting also, like say m4 is a great one, thought I'd generally not a big fan of the ones with a lot of cobalt. m4 like I said, also zmax at the lower toughness end. I'm not super big on high speed steels for knives.
lc200n is an interesting steel for high toughness and corrosion resistance. I'd like to see this used as cladding on high performance knives with straight vanadium steels like say 10v at 65 rc in a crazy kitchen knife or say a non hard use edc. Vanax and vancron also look interesting in their own ways. Nitrogen steels are interesting in their own ways.
