Do any of these models do well with information retrieval and reasoning from text?

I'm reading newspaper articles through a MoE of gemini3flash and gpt5mini, and what made it hard to use open models (at the time) was a lack of support for pydantic.

That roughly correlates with tool calling capabilities. Kimi K2.5 is a lot better than previous open source models in that regard.

You should try out K2.5 for your use case, it might actually succeed where previous generation open source models failed.