Except they already did this: if they had scaled 4.5 with RL, 5 would probably have been the leap we expected

If anything 4.5 being abandoned so they could sell India a $3 a month subscription was the first crack in The Box

Did you really mean to say 4.5? Gpt 4.5 used to cost $75/$150 per million tokens input/output. And it did not even seem to be that good to justify that. I would not expect many people were using it, and I doubt that "expanding to india" was what killed it (if it was that useful/popular they would have kept the api, or keep it for higher end subscriptions).

If anything it should have been no1 in the "openAI graveyard" website.