I did come across a little bit passionate in my comment above.
I think, in general, the intended audience for these types of knives are not this kind of community. Let's be real, most of you guys are very particular about nuances and maximizing performance per your investment. Everything from steel choice, heat treatment, carbides, alloying elements, edge thickness, convexity, surface area energy, weight, tapers, moment of inertia, etc. The truth is that performance has diminishing returns at a certain point, and after that you just can't get better, you just get different. Something that is good, unique, and even iconic is what drives a commanding price.
Mareko's demand is immense, and there's absolutely no way that he can satisfy that demand realistically. There's a huge, growing, new market of people who are just getting into high-end handmade knives, and they are not so experienced at that level. I agree that 52100 is a great freakin' steel, but it is more involved when it comes to the heat treatment, and more time when it comes to grinding and finishing. For someone relatively new, they might not even notice those differences when it comes to edge performance, and I might even argue that it could be easier to learn how to take care of a knife out of 1075 versus 52100, if it's even noticeable to that extent. Heck, there is a massive market of people buying those knives purely as gifts.
Those are just some thoughts from a business standpoint.
As far as actual physical characteristics of the knives, it's the same exact grind he does by hand for his full-on customs, with a fully-sculpted handle. Bar minimum for me, if any well-designed handmade kitchen knife has those and is executed at a high level, that in itself should be a $1000 starting point. That in itself is an immense amount of time and skill that I honestly respect. Maybe I'm slightly biased in my viewpoint, but I actually handled one of these knives just a couple weeks ago.