Personally I think this belief in the vast inferiority of stainless steels is a holdover from the first part of the 20th century, when stainless metallurgy and heat treatment was not as well understood as it is now. Or as a result of poor design and lacking knowledge, actively exploited by the mass market. A person who doesn't do much research and buys a cheap knife made of 420 stainless will form the correct opinion that this metal doesn't make a terribly good knife, without arriving at the realization that there are a LOT of different "flavors" of stainless. Your average person on the street divides metal into steel, stainless steel, and high carbon steel, while in reality there are hundreds of different alloys on the market and the classifications are not so absolute. And that typically you get what you pay for.

The solution is to probably just hand people a good quality stainless knife, and let them fall in love before telling them what it's made of. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Which would probably do the world of blade design a lot of good in general: to encourage customers to ask "How well does it cut" before "What's it made of".