Hello ladies,
The heavy knife cuts more easily, partly because it's heavier but mostly because Lady Tuna's knives are dull.
There's no law saying you must prefer a lighter to a heavier knife, that's a matter of taste. But light or heavy, ordinary cutting should not require more than the slightest physical effort, beyond lifting the edge to whatever it is you want to cut. The sensation of cutting with a chef's knife should be "falling through."
Most people prefer the "heft" of heavier knives when "demonstrating" them in a store; but most skilled cutters prefer a lighter knife, and the modern trend is towards very light, very thin blades.
For most cutting the cook's grip should be no stronger than necessary to keep the knife from falling out of her (or his) hand. If you need more strength, you're either cutting something difficult (a pumpkin, for instance) with a knife disposed to "wedge" (the sides of the knife split the cut apart, rather than the edge slicing through the bottom of the cut), or your knife is dull.
A familiar example of wedging, one we've all seen and experienced, is the cut running ahead of the knife blade when splitting a watermelon.
Before saying anything about Pampered Chef knives, let me stress that there's no arguing with taste -- and if you like yours that's a good thing. I'm not trying to tell you what to like or what to buy, just provide a little education. So, with that said...
Pampered Chefs are forged from a bottom end, German steel, called X45CrMoV15 -- the same steel Mercers are made from. The alloy has just enough carbon in it, 0.45% to be technically called "high carbon" in Germany, but the industry standard through most of the world is a minimum of 0.50% to be called "high carbon" "Forging" sounds like a good thing, but in knives made as inexpensively as the Pampered Chefs, it actually makes the knives more difficult to sharpen (and heavier), because they're so thick. The knives sharpen adequately but lose their edges quickly and need very frequent steeling -- a consequence of their soft alloy. Sharp or dull, their thickness makes them prone to wedging.
With knives sharpness is everything. Look at it this way... any dull knife is simply a dull knife. It doesn't matter how expensive or how good it was when it was sharp.
Sharpening can seem like a daunting task, but there are actually a few good methods which don't involve more than pulling the knife through a slot. Chef's Choice electric machines are very good and very convenient; and the Fiskars/MAC rollsharp isn't bad if you don't need a fine edge. Steeling is not sharpening, and indeed you want to avoid any steel aggressive enough to "sharpen." In any case it's a fact of life when maintaining most knives, and a necessary skill to learn -- unless you have a machine which will do it for you.
The R.H. Forschner Fibrox and Rosewood lines probably represent the least amount you can spend and still get a decent quality knife. They are much better than Pampered Chef -- as long as you keep them sharp.
BDL