. . do any work with a $1 knife and it needs sharpenig again.

Now, I confess that I splurged $82.00 for my Shun Classic Damascus, but it needs only a few strokes on a fine diamond stone every two weeks, or so (of daily use) and it easily slices tomatoes as thin as that thing does.

Incidentally, the "Damascus" feature is purely decorative, doesn't have the slightest impact on performance. Performance comes from an extremely hard non-Damascus core sharpened at a much shallower angle than Euro/American knives.

Euro/American knives are rather soft, "so they're easy to sharpen", and they don't hold an edge very well, so they're sharpened at a steeper angle.

This is the 7 inch Santoku, basically a vegetable slicing knife, which I use at least as much as the Prep Knife. I consider a razor sharp Santoku an essential.

My general Prep Knife is a 6-3/4 Mioroshi Deba I bought nearly 50 years ago. The Mioroshi is longer and narrower than the regular Deba, more like a Chef's Knife. The regular Deba is very short, thick and wide, strictly a meat knife.

These two account for 90% of my knife usage. Most of the rest is a 50 year old extremely sharp carbon steel Chinese Cleaver Knife (Dexter-Russell S5198 8" Chinese Chef's Knife - Traditional Series). This I use with a soft faced mallet to drive through pig ribs and feet, whole fish, frozen foods, and similar uses. Less than 1% of my use is a heavy and very sharp Henkels meat cleaver, used to split hard bones, again driven by the soft faced mallet.

The Mioroshi is so old it proudly proclaims "440A Stainless", the steel that made stainless knives usable. No fancy knife maker would proclaim 440A today, they all have their own "special alloy", which is invariably a very slight variation of 440A.

As far as knives go, I find an 8 inch prep knife too long. My world traveling friends gave me an 8" Sabatier, one of the last from their carbon steel line, but I found it too clumsy. When they finally settled down in a Las Vegas condo, I gave it back.

A funny: many years ago Sabatier decided to make only stainless knives, but they had a large supply of carbon steel blanks. They sold these off as scrap, but the buyer didn't scrap them, he started finishing them and selling them. They were so successful, Sabatier decided to restart production of carbon steel knives.

My attitude toward tools, from long experience, is that the high cost of higher quality is a pain soon forgotten. The pain of an inferior tool does not go away.