Mate, you don't need to be a chicken to know what an egg looks like:- you can gain more knowledge than you would ever need about custom knives by reading the hard copy literature. I suggest a good place to start might be the books written by Jim Hrisoulas.
Re steel quality.
there's damascus and damascus. You can forge weld any two different ferric materials together and get something that looks like damascus, but it won't necessarily perform like damascus. A lot of the current stuff out of India and China is like this.
All the damascus that I made I used 01 steel in, combined with various other materials such as wrought iron, mild steel, nickel & so on.Whatever is used should be heat treated to the specs of the high carbon steel used. This is the reason I used 01, it is easy for an ordinary smith working with fire to get a good result in heat treatment with this steel.
However, depending on intended use, you can make a useable blade from ordinary mild steel which has only small quantities of carbon, its just that the blade will not hold an edge as long, but on the pro side, its not likely to break either. In fact, for a short stabbing weapon mild steel performs pretty good, and costs very little.
As to forming an opinion on the quality of steel based upon what you can actually see, well, I personally cannot.
Give a mirror finish to a piece of mild steel and it can look just as good as the finest hi-tech alloy steel. In fact, a lot of knives made as works of art are made from steel that has not been heat-treated. Why? Because the maker doesn't want to blow 40 or more hours work on a heat treat that goes bad, so he doesn't take the risk. The thing was made as a work of art, not a user.
If we are talking about trad knives, OK, here's the indicator:- go down to the local market and look at what the meat and vege sellers are using; if these are the local knives they are knives made to use.You can bet they're not fancy.
The user daggers and throat cutters of yesteryear are now replaced by more modern weapons, so these types of trad knife are often simply dress knives and made to dress standards not use standards. If you want a trad ethnic knife as a work of art that is also a user seek out a good, reliable maker and order one.
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