If _you_ really believe this is what all users want, _you_ should reconsider. Your describing a feature for power users. It should be a toggle but it's silly to say it didn't improve UX for people who don't want to read strange babbling chains of thought.

You're accusing me of mind reading other users, but then proceed to engage in your own mind reading of those same users.

Have a look in Gemini related subreddits after they nerfed their CoT yesterday. There's nobody happy about this trend. A high quality CoT that gets put through a small LLM is really no better than noise. Paternalistic noise. It's not worth reading. Just don't even show me the CoT at all.

If someone is paying for Opus 4 then they likely are a power user, anyway. They're doing it for the frontier performance and I would assume such users would appreciate the real CoT.

Here's an example non-power-user usecase for CoT:

Sometimes when I miss to specify a detail in my prompt and it's just a short task where I don't bother with long processes like "ask clarifying questions, make a plan and then follow it" etc etc, I see it talking about making that assumption in the CoT and I immediately cancel the request and edit the detail in.