What better for an EDC user than one you can send back to the mothership for a free renew-ing for only the cost of shipping, forever? Spyderco voids the warranty if you take it apart, CRK posts the instructions online and offers to finish the job if you screw it up.
Some sebenzas are inlaid beauty queens, some are hard workers. Some Spydercos are just goofy projects/collaborations that result in a wildly impractical knife, some are EDC workhorses. I actually saw an inlaid Sebenza that was calling my name a couple of weeks ago but decided I wanted a knife to carry, not a bbq knife, so I passed. I won’t ever sell my plain 21 though.
MSRP on a Spyderco Paysan is $800, well into boutique range and well over a Sebenza. Sure it has some exotic steel, but so what? I’ve never been let down by s35vn - it just works. The Spyderco Native 5 I just bought in Maxamet retails for $250 (I got a second for like $80). The thing has a small blade and linerless nylon handles. It doesn’t even have frigging washers, just the blade riding directly on the nylon scales. Will Spyderco fix it if the Maxamet blade chips or snaps, as some have been known to do? The question of whether something is overpriced isn’t just about the price tag.
Sebenzas are an old design that they’ve tweaked over the years but I have yet to find another practical-sized pocket folder that comes as close to feeling like a fixed blade was it’s opened and locked. There ain’t no window dressing on a plain sebenza, and is it really hype when it’s been going strong for 30+ years? What I find hard to understand is how they can still command the price (with a long wait list) when there are so many frigging sebenzas in circulation, but people don’t sell them unless they’re getting their money back at least. There’s a reason.
Whether a given knife is an EDC user or a boutique knife that’s too nice to work depends largely on the owner’s risk tolerances, provided we’re talking about knives that are actually capable of doing the job day in and day out.