Most every method works well if you know what you’re doing and are consistent. As with all things knife related it’s a compromise- every method has advantages and disadvantages and different pitfalls and dangers and learning curves. And costs. As long as you’re happy, and competent with your method, knives get sharp and food gets cut. I don’t think any method is “better” than the other, there are just people who do it with care, knowledge, and skill, and there are people who do it without any of those things.
For me, I started down this serious sharpening rabbit hole about 5 years ago when I was running kitchens and had a bunch of cooks with a bunch of dull ass knives. I looked at from the perspective of speed and utility and volume. Before that I had always managed my own knives with whatever greasy dished out stone happened to be around, Boy Scout style, and a diamond rod, and was mostly sharp and satisfied. Anyway, over the next few months I got a worksharp, a kme fixed angle, a 1x30, and some diamond and synthetic stones. I used them all and had very good results with them all. I found stones to be my favorite, and found it to be very personally rewarding and even meditative. I have always valued simplicity, and it doesn’t get much simpler that water, stone, metal. Now at almost 2 years sharpening professionally in the shop, almost exclusively on stones, I’ve been starting to explore different equipment options for volume sharpening of lower quality knives. I still haven’t landed on a final solution, and expect I will probably just keep experimenting for another 20 years, but I think good quality knives will always go to the stones.
anyway that’s a long way to get back to the point, which is they all have pros and cons. In my experience, to achieve excellent results it stacks up like this-
Belts- (anything from a worksharp to a 2x72) definitely the fastest, and easiest to screw up badly, but with good technique very consistent results both in a high level of sharpness and aesthetically. Pretty easy to achieve both crisp flat bevels or convexed. Dangers are overheating the steel, removing too much material, metal in your eyeballs. Other cons- equipment and belt costs, dust management, burr management, kind of boring work. Also noise.
Stones- medium fastness, easiest set up, lowest cost, little danger of damaging the knife irreparably, meditative, excellent quality of edge and aesthetics with good technique. Cons- its the hardest to be really good at and requires a lot of practice to consistently achieve high level results, physically taxing at volume, you will probably want to buy too many stones, and you will most definitely bleed. Also dirty fingernails.
Fixed angle systems- consistent* results, great edges and flat bevels, excellent aesthetics. Especially good for smaller blades. Negatives- the slowest, lots of set up, often expensive, huge angle discrepancy on larger knives. *the problem with say they’re consistent is that if you don’t set up the knife exactly in the same spot as the last time then you basically have to cut in a new edge geometry every time and I don’t know how you can track that.
of course I haven’t used many of the higher end systems, so I could be missing some stuff. I wouldn’t mind playing around with a wicked edge sometime, or having one around the shop for pocket knives and the like, but I have definitely used a number of knives sharpened on one, and they were pretty spectacular.
Given you have used quite a few systems:
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