This is all completely untrue. Al Pendray and Dr. Jan Verhoeven figured out wootz back in the '70s, and people even make it at small “hammer-ins”. We have extensive chemical analyses of original historical wootz “bulat” and antique blades. As for modern steel outperforming wootz, it depends on what you want. If you want a hypereutectoid steel that has lots and lots of carbides in a softer iron like matrix, then it’s f-ing amazing. If you want something rust resistant or more uniform in properties, then yeah, not so awesome. Wootz is simply one of the original dentritic carbide materials.
As for old school pattern welded “damascus”, that never got lost. Also there have been extensive metallurgical studies performed on old pattern welded blades from scandanavia etc…
And… Japanese sword technology is technically a layered material as well, and that’s never been lost either…
As for modern pattern welded steel not performing up to the standards of “modern carbon steel”, what do you think it’s made of? Modern smiths use modern “carbon steels” for their pattern welded material, and as long as their heat treat is good, it’s just like any other modern alloy. Hell, one of the fun things to do is to try to make “super damascus” by tweaking which alloys you use to make your pattern weld to get the benefits of some of the more recently developed alloys. I personally like to use two high alloy “high carbon” steels to make my damascus (1084MF/15n20), which gives you a nice high contrast blade with all the benefits of modern alloys/metallurgy.
But yeah, TBH, there really isn’t a big advantage to damascus over a single alloy steel nowadays, it’s mostly for the pretty. That being said, as noted above, there really isn’t a disadvantage either.
If you want to see some amazing “damascus” blades in action, google videos of the American Bladesmith Society Mastersmith test. For your mastersmith ranking, all the blades are pattern weld, and you need to do a performance test with one that involves shaving hair, chopping a 2x4, cutting a 1"free hanging manila rope, then shaving hair again (i.e. it has to get to this stage without edge dulling or damage), then putting it in a vise and bending it to 90 degrees without it breaking. I’ve personally witnessed blades fail horifically during this test, and I’ve seen others pass with flying colors. If that’s not “performance” then I don’t know what is.
