I 100% agree with your philosophy but I wanna note that I genuinely find Gemma 4 31b to be better than Sonnet. To be clear, this makes NO sense to me, so I'm probably just high and making stuff up or just biased by a small sample size since I don't use Sonnet that often. I find that Gemma 4 makes the sort of "dumb AI" mistakes Sonnet makes less often, especially in agentic mode. I genuinely don't know how that can be true but Sonnet feels much more like "autocomplete" and Gemma 4 feels like "some facsimile of thought".