I have still not yet been able to get my hands on this knife and sadly Rakuten is now telling me it will be over a year before I can get a Yoshikane 270 delivered to me so I'm going to open up my options to include carbon knives, but I would prefer something that isn't going to go into hyper-reactive mode, so stainless cladding might be an option or at the very least a not-so-reactive iron cladding. I'm probably leaning towards something in blue steel although it's not critical. I'm working a few jobs at the moment, but this knife will hopefully end up in my work rotation which means I'd likely be cutting on POS plastic chopping boards at the places I'm helping out until I settle on a full-time position somewhere. I have been curious about honyaki blades lately but if I'm going to buy one, I'd like it to be damn near perfect as I don't want an expensive blade that I'm going to have to tinker with excessively.
The main attributes I am looking for in my gyuto is a reasonably thick spine close to the heel that tapers to a thin, upswept tip. I'm talking close to 1mm about 1cm out from the very tip of the knife. I also would prefer a blade that is very thin behind the edge or a blade that won't require extensive thinning as I already have a few projects on the go and would like a knife that is basically ready to go. I like my blades pretty hard, despite any potential for brittleness. I have scoped out the honyaki blue 2 mizuno which looks amazing but probably out of my price range at the moment. I am also curious about the blue #1 gyutos I saw from konosuke recently on the tosho knife arts page a few months back. They were advertised at like 65 rockwell or something? They recently sold out but some information on their performance would be sweet.