Although, all of these are great, especially with the busse HT, I chose 154CM for the smaller blades. It's stainless, takes a nice edge and isn't too difficult to sharpen. I own blades in all of these though and like them all. There are many other steels out there that would do well for 4" and under blades. I am trying to decide on a couple steels to stick with for my own knife-making and it is a very tough choice. You have to balance the characteristics that the user is looking for with the properties of the steel that make it either easy or hard to work with. I am hopefully going to choose 1 stainless and 1 non. So far, I have tried 1080 and D2. Next up will be CPM154 and CPMS30V. Honestly, I haven't found a bad steel yet. They are all good in their own way.