> When it comes down to it, most of today’s super exotic alloys will outperform any pattern-welded steel ... A well-made Damascus blade will stay sharp for longer than most production quality knives, but if you’re looking for the ends-of-the-earth best performing blade steel, look elsewhere Can someone link/name one of these super exotic alloys knifes?
Some of these are arguably "more Damascus than Damascus", in a sense that they're also mixes, but on a much finer level. For example, S30V - a relatively affordable "super steel" - is one of those known as "powder steels" due to the way they're made, achieving extreme uniformity and purity of the alloy even at microscopic level:
https://www.knifeart.com/particlesteel.html
This lets knife makers create alloys that are outright impossible using traditional methods (because they wouldn't be able to make them uniform enough). It also means that they can formulate an alloy precisely to match the desired qualities, instead of approximating it by mixing steels in layers as Damascus does.
The kind of stuff we can do with modern technology and modern materials would be considered genuine magic back in the days where the quality of those blades was a life-or-death matter. It's kinda ironic that these days, we use it for EDC knives to avoid sharpening them more often than we'd like.
Here's a good example of how a modern knife made from one of the highest-end steels performs (scroll down to the "Performance" section):