I agree on the 'custom' word.
There are production knives, hand-made knives, and in-between. CRK knives fall into the high-end of the in-between, and there are very few others in that niche.
A custom knife must be ordered to my design or fitting, and made especially for me. Note that this could be all hand-made, or an in-between with (for instance) a custom handle material, or a production (like a Buck custom shop).
Greg
I think of design and execution as two almost completely separate things. The methods by which something is constructed is execution. The manner in which something is configured is design. The fact that something is made entirely or largely by hand says absolutely nothing about the extent to which it's customized.
Sebenzas are basically machine-made and hand-fit. The plain ones are clearly production products, and yet they are higher in quality than many hand-made knives. The reason for this is that CRK understands when to use the machine and when to use the hand, and they set their operation up around that idea. The design relys on having its parts machined to very close tolerances. Performing those operations by hand would be a step backward in quality, not forward. OTOH, you have to hand-fit a lock bar to its tang to really get it right.
So, IMO, the thing that makes the 'Benzas so good is the way that machine and hand operations are combined. And that is a matter of the quality of execution, not the design.
I guess it could be argued that a 'Benza or Umfaan with unique slabs is a 'customized' knife, but it is still a production product. "Custom" would be the result if I had designed the Umfaan, drawn it up, sent it to CRK and they had made just one to my specifications - regardless of the extent to which machines were involved.
If significant hand work is going to be done on a knife, I think it's important for that work to be well blended into the composition. This is another real strength of the CRK products. The grinds are generally very well executed, but then all the milling is done by machine. They work well together to form a nicely resolved composition.
I have two knives from famous makers that are kind of botched in this respect. On one, the blank is laser-cut, but the grinds don't have good symmetry. On the other, the grinds look great, but there's a flubbed machine cut. When you build something, you've got to think about how well the parts add up. CRK does that very well. It's entirely possible to do good work and yet have the sum of the parts fall short of what the whole should be. That can happen with design, execution, or both.
