I don't like spring-assisted knives. There's not much point to the assist and most of them are cheap quality trash.
Most are really bad yeah, but Kershaw's torsion bar assist is pretty reliable. However I really like benchmade's eyehole lock.
I've been impressed with Kershaw's quality-to-price ratio, overall. You can get the speedsafe knives pretty reliably on sale for around $15 and for that money, I think they're really hard to beat. They have a lot of different styles to suit whatever your needs are. My kershaw clash is probably one of the nicest combat-style folders I've seen. But if you want something lighter, the abundance of styles gives you plenty of options. The Volt has a nice weight-size ratio.
Of course, the cheaper kershaws are all 8cr13mov, but with something that you might end up losing anyway (stolen, confiscated, lost, taken away by TSA etc), I wouldn't want to pay out big cash for an EDC or combat knife.
The only thing I don't like about Kershaw is their insistence on using a flipper instead of a thumb stud.