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You may need annealing to do much working of this alloy, it just shouldn't be heavy annealing like what the mill did. There are spheroidizing procedures that involve long kiln ramps, these are the type that build large spheroids. Shorter procedures that simply ball the carbides into fine spheres are more responsive to heat treatment. Even the ramp cycles will work if you don't over do it with the low temp cycles beforehand. I have locked up my O-1/L6 Damascus the same way (63 HRC max) by getting crazy about cycling everything down as fine as possible and then a long ramp anneal. It required the same fix as the 52100.
So it really is not the fault of the steel, it is all the goofy things that bladesmiths do to it. I have a saying that I use often- there are no bad steels, there are only bad application choices and bad heat treatments (or perhaps, bad heat treaters). I really think that sometimes bladesmiths get so hung up on making the "ultimate" knife that they don't take the time to simply make a good knife. Ultra uber superdooper fine grain, .0001% retained austenite etc.. when in the end it is just a knife, and you need a laboratory just to detect these differences. Don't get me wrong, the pursuit of that last 1% is what drives us to get better, and I am the worst about it, but sometimes it results in serious mission drift and we forget what it is we are trying to make.
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