I have a cheap OTF - $39 - and it's no more worthless than a $25 folder. It cuts down boxes, or opens them, cleans fingernails, and does most of the other stuff an inexpensive knife does. I've had Branded knives that were problematic out of the box and a huge disappointment - like the Buck Strider Tarani in 420 and FRN. Bad lock, soft steel, overdone features, riveted construction, abrasive checkering that damaged jeans within a few days. In comparison the OTF is looking ok. Not the quality of a BM Rift or Strider SnG, no. Worthless? That's overreacting.
The out of the box knives you are referencing are not very good by any standard. Benchmade and Strider make reasonably well made production knives, but most of their products are far from anything special.
Form factor on blade steels, shape and grind do make a difference but a lot of it is also user skill. Changing up from the OTF to a BM CQC7 chisel grind tanto reminds me of how it steers to one side cutting and has no belly at all. The OTF I chose is a simple single edge blade grind with swedge with is about average on the market, and handles about average for the knives I own. So far it hasn't needed sharpening but I'm just using it EDC to see what will result.
With the exception of Chuck Norris, skill can NOT offset physics!!! Blade design is EVERYTHING, as is the quality of the heat treatment. If this was not a major difference, we'd all be using Frost Cutlery 39-cent folders.
Your customers are going to want to know these things prior to buying...
-Why are you grinding a swedge into a utility blade, given it unnecessarily removes metal from the blade, usually for the purpose of cosmetic purposes?
-Is this blade going to be a drop point? Clip point? Spear point? Hybrid?
-Are you using a hollow, flat, sabre, chisel, or convex grind?
-What angle are you grinding the blade at?
-How are you heat treating your AUS8?
-What materials are you using for your internals?
-How well does your disconnect work so that, if the knife opens in your pocket, it doesn't punch a massive hole on your leg?
-Is your test blade using a single or secondary microbevel?
If you are going to design a knife, and you want knife people to buy it, going to painstaking lengths to achieve the best blade design possible should be one of the earliest points of design. Most knives from Benchmade and Strider are not known for spectacular blade grinds, but there are many companies offering knives with outstanding geometric design that are very affordable.
Do you think your OTF will have remotely comparable blade performance versus the SuperBlue or ZDP-189 Spyderco Delica with a full flat grind, or a CPM-S30V Ritter Griptilian with a high flat grind? Your knife is going to be competing with these, and people spending $80+ on a knife are going to demand quality.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate just how dramatic blade performance differences can be is to purchase a Benchmade Griptilian in S30V steel and purchase a Benchmade Ritter Griptilian (in the same S30V steel), use each for several identical tests, keep track of which blade dulls faster, try to sharpen each, and examine the results in regards to what that means to the end user. While reviews of knives priced $20-50 tend to focus less on details, when you get close to that hundred dollar threshold, many individual users and reviewers alike are going to base a large portion of how they rate an EDC knife on the blade's design...not the novelty of the opening mechanism.
A nice AUS8A single edge 3.5" long with G10 handles for $80would be a good working knife. Nobody makes it in the current climate but when they do things are going to rapidly change.
A knife at that price is going to be competing with other folders using blade steels dramatically superior to AUS8. While you may feel some of the listed features are not important to you personally, your prospective customers will.
Also, it seems unlikely that G10 has enough structural rigidity to be used to make a good OTF without stainless or titanium liners, and the addition of liners can rapidly drive up the cost of a knife (for example, the Spyderco Delica 3 vs. the Spyderco Delica 4, or the Spyderco Civilian without liners vs the newer Civilian with dual liners, or Emerson moving to dual titanium liners to save weight over steel.
Finally, if your goal is to make a knife that can handle a ton of cardboard, AUS8 is not desirable at all. Since cardboard rapidly dulls blades, the steels suited best to prolonged cardboard use are steels with very high wear resistance. Examples of this are Bohler M390 MicroClean, or Crucible CPM-S90V. M390 is very likable because, while it has extremely high wear resistance and holds its edge much longer than most other knife steels, most users find it to be relatively easy to sharpen versus something like S90V. Additionally, S90V and M390 are capable of holding paper thin edges for prolonged periods and resist rolling far better than say your standard 154, VG-10, ATS-34, D2, 440C, etc.