Even for non-developer use cases o3 is a much better model for me than GPT5 on any setting.

30 seconds-1 minute is just the time I am patient enough to wait as that's the time I am spending on writing a question.

Faster models just make too many mistakes / don't understand the question.

Completely agree. This is why they brought back the “legacy models” option.

GPT-$ is the money gpt in my opinion. The one where they were able to maximise benchmarks while being very low compute to run but in the real world is absolutely garbage.