I would definitely prefer if the FIF challenges were something other than: forge a knife from some hunk of a cannon/used blade/whatever, HT it under time constraint in a brightly lit area with a vertical forge and some luck, grind heavily after HT before temper, have blade tempered by someone else, slap on a handle w/ 5m epoxy and bash into a block of X.
It would be great to see: take your pick of steels, forge, grind, HT in a controlled environment, control for as many variables as possible. But then every episode would come down to: Bob's finish and hamon looked great, but Bill's slightly weight forward blade made it bight slightly more deeply into the sugar cane. There would be no spectacular failures, no big warps, no cracks, no handle failures. Even if you left the time constraint for the 1st challenge, if you gave guys a full range of HT tools and known steels, blade failures would be extraordinarily low.
We see failures nearly every episode. Any vaguely experienced smith, working with known materials in a reasonable size with good HT equipment, even under time constraint could turn in a structurally sound, straight blade in 3 hrs. The show would be boring for most viewers. When was the last time a maker here had a blade fail while doing something that they didn't already know was high risk (interrupted quench for hamon development for instance)?
So, just take the show for what it is: kinda fun, kinda silly, and a good way to see cool techniques you haven't seen before and the failure of dumb ideas you may never have even considered before. Also, the cautionary tale of competent smiths pushed past their comfort zone and rather than doing research, using rake handles on $10k spears.
