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Originally Posted by Atlantia
How many man-hours does it take to 'create' a good Katana?
How many 'good' broadswords could be created in the same timeframe?
Katana Vs unarmed peasant/bound POW/Criminal etc = Excellent
Katana Vs light armour (leather/fabric/thin laminated wood/V thin metal) = Medium results.
Katana Vs Medium/heavy armour = potential catestrophic damage to blade, as does any even glancing blow to solid object etc.
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Well, how long does it take to make a katana, if you're just aiming for a good weapon (and not an "art sword")? How long does a 15th century arming sword take to make? Looking at the cost of making modern day replicas I guess a katana might take slightly longer, but without any numbers for comparison it seems meaningless to try and guess if the difference is meaningful or not.
The armour bit seems odd as well. The Japanese did have iron armour after all, so it seems decidedly odd that they'd stick to a sword which risked catastrophic failure if you accidentally hit your opponents armour. And even without armour I find such a sword an oddity, given that you might always happen to hit your opponents sword, coin purse teeth, some buckle or jewellery, etc. (This isn't to say that I believe the Japanese would simply try to cut through iron lamellar. As far as I've understood it, both in Japan and in Europe, the primary answer to iron armour was to attack where the armour wasn't.)
As for my own experiences, modern ZNKR iaido and kendo kata both avoid edge-on-edge contact (from what I've understood, European longsword fencing does the same), but there's a number of blade-on-blade techniques, some done with a decent amount of force behind them. And for what it's worth, some test cutting I've done with a cheap, modern, Chinese replica has resulted in a few more-than-glancing blows hitting the unyielding chopping block, without the blade cracking. Not traditionally made of course, but even with the improvements in metallurgy over the year it seems to me that a budget offering from China wouldn't be all that good compared to the real thing.
So while there are indeed some who will exaggerate the performance of the katana, I don't feel that the answer to that is to exaggerate in the other direction (such as some of these points may be, or like the last paragraph you wrote about the European blade). Sadly, such often seems to happen when any comparisons are made between sword A and sword B, and it's one reason why I'm sceptical about the possible usefulness of such.