david weaver
Sharpen a few carving tools on lapping film, record the time that it takes to affix it to something solidly (you can use it with just water, but it's screwing around), then record the time that it takes to screw with it after you accidentally cut it or get a single contaminant caught under it.

It's just screwing around. I've been down the road of trying all of it. 3x6 sheets, 8 1/2 x11 size sheets, whatever it may be.

In terms of the steels above and beyond carbon steel, there is no real practical advantage unless someone is new and takes eons to sharpen. In that case, the problem is sharpening, and not steel.

Screwing around with all of that stuff goes away very quickly if you streamline your setup to just do work. Soaking stones, flattening stones, fiddling with powders and pastes, fiddling with films, screwing around with honing guides. All of it gets in the way of actually getting anything done.

There is merit in some of that stuff if the contest is the largest number of feet of cocobolo planed in a row with shavings no thicker than 1 thousandth, but learning to work like that is a block itself. It's far better to learn to do the coarse work as coarse work, which requires tearout mitigation, but that's about it.

In terms of uniformity, the sapphire lens on a king seiko was finished in a matter of minutes with an atoma and the 6500 diamond followed by fractional micron. If an atoma can do coarse work on a watch face, worrying about uniformity beyond that is well, way beyond pointless.

I could take a rank beginner and set them up with a washita stone, a grinder and a piece of jasper (for the few instances where a little more is good) and they would work anyone with a modern setup right out of the room.