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Ray,
I think it is a very worthwhile effort. Common terminology is necessary for any field.
That being said, I think we all generally agree (at least in connotation, if not in denotation) what a custom knife is.
Much of the impetus behind some of the past discussion threads was the gray line between a custom knife and a knife blade assembled from a kit.
Any of the terms and definitions you've offered so far, whether it be a sole-authorship knife or hand-crafted knife, can be fit under the umbrella term of custom knife and all of us here would be comfortable and understand what we mean.
We have true custom makers here (general definition). We have people who assemble kits here. In between is that gray area--people who assemble kits, and do them very well, taking the manufactured blade and adding their own creative touch in scales, liners, filework, etc. Some of them want to be recognized for the work that they do, either in the form of reputation or by cash in hand.
They are not true custom knifemakers. Yet they have done more than attach pre-fabbed handles to a production knife. The challenge is to define, and distinguish, this work from a true custom knife.
Do we call them customized production knives? Custom assembly? Personalized assembly? Decorated production knives? Semi-production? Given that there is an entire industry built around people who individually assemble, decorate, and collect production knives--knives made for that purpose, or factory-produced knives sold commercially and later rejuvinated--the knifemaking community needs to define what it is exactly that they do.
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