Just a perspective, I've made and used knives out of a bunch of different steels both Carbon and stainless. Some of the very "best" stainless steels are extremely hard to sharpen without specialty tools and so forth. There are guys who want knives out of these steels and are willing to invest in the tools/techniques required to sharpen them. They can be great, but the guy who uses them probably needs to be sure they are capable of resharpening them. There are low end stainless steels that work just fine and just need to be resharpened regularly. Those are the ones that used to be sold in the hardware stores (and probably still are) which my grandfather kept razor sharp, but had to resharpen all the time. Then there are steels that fall in sort of the middle area, which will hold an edge for a long time but are still reasonably straightforward to sharpen. CPM 154, S30V, S35V, elmax and a host of others are where I see this middle ground. I like this area of stainless because it lands in the area in between the bottom and the top and is probably where the majority of knife users want their knife to land. After that, as Vince said, it becomes more about the grind, heat treat and purpose.
