Let me just wade in briefly... I have a Zakuri 165mm Aogami #1 Tosagata Bocho which I just finished thinning and refinishing, and I can confirm your suspicions, that this is far too much of a little gem to abuse. It's still a project knife, but it's a project knife that turns into something really lovely with a bit of work, so maybe a better one to look at for down the road.
There is much talk of perfecting your freehand skills on good carbon steels, as it makes it easier and less frustrating to get a good edge. However, I did not - nor I wager did many others on this forum - learn to sharpen this way. I learned on soft, cheap, American and Euro stainless for the most part, using Arkansas stones; the best steels I really ever had available then were some Stanley 1095-mod (Chrome-vanadium) chisels and plane irons. It was slow and frustrating, and good edges did not come easily, but the experience taught me a lot about sharpening. After I began purchasing knives and tools with nicer steels, and upgrading my stones, sharpening became much easier and more enjoyable (It felt like a reward after what I had gone through to get there!), but I don't know if I would have learned what I did if I had started out with the high quality steels and the fast, forgiving stones. Sometimes it is a good thing that you are not immediately gratified, as this pushes you to learn more, and not grow confident in your results when you are still inexperienced.
If you want a cheap knife that has better than average steel and can use some time spent sharpening and thinning (Also, since you're already a Spyderco fan.), get yourself one of the plastic handled, Spyderco MBS-26 kitchen knives. These are typically $30-50 depending upon the model, and really aren't bad. At the same time, they aren't so nice that you'll feel bad beatin' on 'em, and you can be confident that you aren't destroying something unique like a hand-forged J-Knife. The grinds get thick quick, but MBS-26 is a really surprisingly nice stainless to sharpen, can take a really good edge, and doesn't have the burr problems of some of the cheaper SS's. Is it Hitachi carbon? No, but that's your reward at the end of the tunnel. Compared to a lot of the cheap SS on the market, something like MBS-26 is still really pretty darn cushy to practice with...
Hopefully this helps...
- Steampunk