The Victorian Court reinvented hand knitting without great attention to historical facts. One of their myths was that most knitting was done by amateurs  - e.g., some woman in the household.

In fact, in various periods, England had robust guilds of professional knitters. Even after the guilds of professional knitters had declined, there were collectives of contract knitters, that would spend part of most days knitting objects for sale through commercial channels.  Regions developed particular skills for knitting certain kinds of objects. Those skills represented a comparitive economic advantage, and factors would come to those regions to buy knit objects for sale elsewhere.

Part of the comparative advantage of a region would be a specialized knitting toolkit for knitting certain kinds of objects. We have forgotten that knitting toolkits can be specialized - today everyone has very generalized knitting needles. In most strata of the knitting community, most people use circular needles for socks, baby clothes, and sweaters. 

However, if my family made most of their cash income from knitting ganseys for sailors and your family  made most of its cash income from knitting socks for royalty, then we might have different tool kits. 

Certainly, a knitting toolkit optimized for ganseys or fine socks can be used for knitting anything needed by anyone in the extended family. Still, toolkits for knitting can be optimized for a particular kind of knitting.

There were a lot of different styles of knitting sheaths produced by various regions in different periods of history. I have long wondered if the differences were just regional and/or temporal variance or whether they indicated different knitting techniques which were useful for knitting different kinds of objects.

There is a bunch of yarn sitting on bobbins waiting for the twist to relax, so I have been finishing up a bunch of old knitting works in progress.  This has involved abrupt transitions between objects with different needs. None of the gentile approaches, where one starts knitting swatches, and gradualy falls in love with the style of the fabric, and accustomed to the technique used to produce that fabric.  No! I pick up a KIP, and with the knitting sheath at hand, I start knitting. 

My conclusion is that Durham Sheaths are better for the technique that I call "gansey knitting", and Yorkshire Goose Wings are much better for what I call "swaving.  I have settled on using the Durham Sheath for knitting anything a fisherman might use - anything knit from 5-ply worsted spun 1,000 ypp yarns. For such knitting, I use blunt "needles" (aka "pricks") , about 30 cm long and between 1.5 mm and 2.3 mm in diameter. I have stopped using 16" and 18" long "gansey needles".  The skills learned from swaving have informed and refined my gansey knitting skills, so now the shorter pricks are are faster and more convenient. I have knit swatches (pronounced as "socks")  from 4-ply equivalent to the  4-ply Beehive listed by Gladys Thompson for the fine Norfolk - Sheringham ganseys, knit at 12 spi and 20 rpi on 1.65 mm needles.  For these fabrics I prefer the Durham Sheath with spring steel blunt spring steel pricks.  However, the first time I strapped on a Yorkshire goose wing, I was struck with the absolute brilliance of the design for general purpose knitting. (It took me a long, long time to come to appreciate the virtues of  Durham sheaths.)

I am not saying one kind of knitting is better than the other. A well knit gansey has saved many a British seaman from hypothermia - and allowed Britain to rule the seas, and Britain to become very rich.  I am very partial to objects knit from 5-ply worsted spun 1,000 ypp yarns.  My wife is generally partial to objects knit  more softly; and; such objects are quickly and easily produced with a Yorkshire goose wing. (However, I have swaved wicked hard fabrics from fine cotton crochet thread.)