I've found the same, but I also haven't gained much value out of "deep research" products as a whole. When I last tested them with topics I'm familiar with, I found the quality of research to be poor. These tools seem to spend their time searching for as much content as possible, then they dump it all into a report. I get better outcomes by extensively searching for a handful of top quality sources. Most of the time your question (or at least some subquestions) has already been answered by an expert, and you're better off using their work than sloppily recreating it.

This begs the question of what would be required to get an AI chatbot to emulate the process you (and others, including myself) use manually, and whether it's possible purely through different prompting.

Is the fundamental problem that it weights all sources equally so a bunch of non-experts stating the wrong answer will overpower a single expert saying the correct answer?