david weaver
That's a good question, it could certainly be an option.

brent beach had a comment about this on his site, where he mentioned that he had small long (along the length of the edge) shallow fractures on the edge of the iron he was using as opposed to narrow deep ones in the direction of the abrasions on a "normally" sharpened iron.

I know Derek has mentioned that he hasn't seen that, but I saw something similar on my irons about the same time I was doing a durability test of a couple of A2 irons (someone loaned me the side sharpening video at the same time).

I never did push it to the limit, though, to see if it actually made a difference in the number of strokes.