Benchmade Bugout & CJRB Pyrite Comparison

Another comparison video. I kinda find them fun, but I haven’t put out many of them to gauge properly whether people care for them or not.
But here we go. They are quite similar in proportions and both have thinner than usual powder metallurgy blades. S30V (or 20CV in my case) will obviously outperform RPM9, but they’re both PM steels.
The Bugout in it’s normal form contains partial liners and reinforced plastic scales. Grivory for the most part, but some use CF-Elite… which is the same thing, but using Carbon Fiber threads rather than Fiberglass as the reinforcement. Either way, the handles “squish” a bit when you squeeze them which isn’t desirable for a lot of people. Since the blade is so thin, it’s not affecting usage, but still annoying. Mine came with G10 scales with fixes the flex, but it’s not a normal option… and besides, I still replaced them with Titanium aftermarket scales.
The Pyrite has about 8,000 variants now, as is the CJRB tradition when a knife becomes popular, like they did with the Ria. My absolute favorite is the one with flat Titanium scales. It’s about a $20-30 upgrade, but you get a better grip surface than the steel handles, it’s a touch lighter and still feels great. They also make a ton of steel linered versions with inlays of all sorts, and even some high end ones with contoured titanium scales and S90V blades for much more money. Still, with my struggles with button lock knives using liners, I’ve stayed away from them personally.
There’s a lot of folks hating a lot on Benchmade lately. As long as it’s about their prices lately, I’m in agreement. There’s something that’s going on at Benchmade that’s causing them to raise their prices higher than the market is OK with. Either they’re losing more and more sales to competitors so they need to make more per piece to make up for that, they’re bleeding money internally, or they’re trying to artificially raise prices to have folks believe they’re a higher-end product than they actually are. I don’t address it in the video (much, to my recollection), but thought I’d drop it here.