To me one of the biggest benefits of higher grade steel is the ability to make lighter and thinner stock knives for more efficiently tools without sacrificing toughness or edge retention.
Eh, I'm not sure I buy this with INFI.
The whole selling point of INFI is that it rolls before it chips. Now you can do some fancy stuff with materials to combine favorable features, but at the end of the day, you still have to obey the laws of physics. To roll before chipping, INFI has to be more malleable than comparable steels which would chip. That malleability means the thinner you get with INFI, the more likely it's gonna be to roll like crazy - much more so than a stiffer, more brittle steel in the same thickness.
No, what makes INFI a "super steel" is that it is somehow able to maintain excellent edge retention while still being so malleable. But you have to make some sacrifices to get that sort of combination - one of those sacrifices being that the steel doesn't work all that well for razor thin blades. There's a reason "bony" knives from Busse are still thicker than "normal" blades from other companies.
"Super steel" can mean a lot of things - it's a combination of wear resistance, edge stability, lateral toughness, stain resistance, etc etc etc... It does NOT have to mean that you can make a strong blade out of thin stock.
On the other hand, many of the other alloys Busse and kin use, since they are essentially modified versions of popular knife steels, might very well work in a thinner geometry. OR, you could produce an INFI knife but give it a higher RC hardness, so the edge is more stable against rolling, sacrificing toughness in the process. That said, when your warranty is "break it and we replace it", thinner knives don't make very good business sense <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />
