I personally think the Swaty's popularity has as much to do with its ready availability (and easy identification) on ebay as it is to any honing qualities. There are several barber hones that work better and that have been thusly acclaimed in some of the same threads as the Swaty. But anybody that reads one of these threads and heads off to ebay is likely to find several Swatys and none of the others - even if they were on ebay they're often harder to identify because they're missing the box that tells the clueless seller what they've got. So the Swaty gets the reputation. But of the four barber hones that I still own the Swaty is at the bottom of the pile.