As explained in another comment, I think this is more about Google orienting Flash towards more complex use cases. If we got minor improvements vs 3 Flash with 1.5x the price so they can optimize their margin (which on such small models for conversational tasks is a completely different stories than the 3-25x subsidies that these agentic coding plans offer) I would have been happy. Or even no change at all. But knowing Google, I now must fear that they will deprecate 3 Flash without offering any realistic option for that user facing chatbot segment that does not require multi-tool use across 500k context.