Zeke, I almost agree with you. D2 (and more specifically, CPM-D2) is my second favorite knife steel. Busse's INFI steel is, to me, the stuff legends are made of. Of course the only knife you'll get made of INFI is a Busse, and not everyone is willing to pay that kind of price.
But from what I've seen, properly heat-treated D2 is about as perfect as you can get with knife steel. Of course, there lies the rub: Heat treating can make or break almost any knife. If you're lucky enough to get a knife that's been heat treated by Paul Bos (like one of
Valkman's knives) you know you can trust the steel to have the right heat treatment. However if you get a knife that's been poorly hardened, it doesn't matter if it's made from 440, D2, Infi, or adamantium, it's going to be so soft it won't hold an edge or so hard it'll chip and/or break.
The 1970s & 1980s is a time period for our country that helped damn near ruin the cutlery industry. it seemed like everyone had to jump on the "stainless" bandwagon which, of course, gave us almost two decades of knives that "never" rusted (though it did happen) but got dull really quickly and couldn't be resharpened without as much effort as it took to build a whole new knife. Even one of our nation's gold standards for knives, Buck, used some really crappy steel for a while. I gave my brother-in-law a Buck 119 for a Christmas present one year. It took him one hunting season's worth of gutting and skinning for him to abandon that beautiful knife for his dad's old Schrade (which I now have, and have no problem cleaning an animal with it.) I guess that's a long story to say that stainless steel sucks for knives. Or at least did for a while.
There are some newer "super stainless" which are pretty good. BG42 is really good, CPM154 is great, and S30V is also really good. Of course it still depends on the heat treatment. I have a Graham Brothers Drop Point that was heat treated by Bos which has an edge so sharp you can nick yourself just by looking at it. It's seen some action but can still smoothly shave hairs off my arm. On the other hand, one of my favorite knives, my Benchmade/Doug Ritter Mini-Griptilian with an S30V blade has a noticeable nick in the blade and I've never done anything to abuse it. It's going back to Benchmade, and I have no doubt they'll either re-profile the blade or just replace it. I'll keep you updated.
If there's a positive side of the stainless debacle, it's that it caused a renaissance of plain old high carbon steel blades on knives. Simple blades like
RAT Cutlery's series have shown that there's a reason that 1095 steel was used successfully for so long. I have to say, RAT is one of my favorite knife companys today.