If INFI is actually tougher than 1095, as it is certainly claimed to be, than it should be able to be more roll resistant at the same hardness, thickness and length as the 1095 RTAK. If it must be thicker to maintain those properties then it is not as tough.
"Toughness" is a specific engineering term. It is defined as the resistance to fracture when stressed. Notice that I did NOT say it is defined as the resistance to rolling. In a materials science sense, toughness is defined as the area under the stress versus strain curve. This curve, however, is not usually a simple linear relationship, and we are well outside the elastic regime, so you apply a strain, and the material can bend in a manner that's not simple to understand. That doesn't mean it's fractured, just that it's bending. That bending, in a knife sense, is usually thought to be something like flexing a blade in a vise, bending it rather than breaking it, but it could also be thought of as flexing the edge of a blade, rolling it rather than chipping it.
In other words, the material science definition of "toughness" as a material quality, doesn't really tell you in simple terms what the roll resistance will be for a given thickness, hardness, and length
Most INFI blades are produced at a claimed Rc 59-60, with some specialty knives that are supposed to be thin slicers at even higher hardness.
Another engineering term - RC hardness is a specific way to test the resistance of a blade to compression. However, in real world applications, knives don't really ever encounter significant compression forces - they encounter shear by the boatload. Normally, for well defined, isotropic Hookean materials, the RC hardness tells you something about the overall material properties and you can infer something about the edge retention or resistance to rolling or chipping, but these inferences are NOT robust, and when materials stray away from the familiar regimes, these assumptions can easily break down.
In other words, RC hardness often tells you something about edge retention and resistance to chipping/rolling, but it's far from a complete picture of the whole story.
I have read no reports of failure with the Skinny ASH and by the laws of physics (for all but chopping and even in chopping it will bite deeper) it will be the more efficient knife than the 0.32" CG ASH-1.
A skinny ASH is still not thin by most knife makers' standards, and I agree that it's a much more efficient deign than the CG ASH1.
A 3/16" SR77 dogfather should be more than tough enough and should be at least as tough as 1095 RTAK at the same hardness and lenght. INFI should be about as tough as S7, or it least it is claimed to be.
SR77 doesn't have the same "roll before chipping" tendency that INFI has, so it would be a much more fair comparison to 1095. 1095 probably has better wear resistance at comparable RC hardnesses, meaning it would hold an edge a little better, but SR77 does indeed have better "toughness" in the engineering sense, so it would be a tradeoff I'd be willing to make. Again, 3/16 isn't really all that thin by knife maker's standards, though.
