I always feel GPT5.5 is better at ‘getting the bigger picture‘ when I am describing something vaguely vs Chinese models. What’s your experience with that?

That's true. The open models still do not match these extreme high end models yet on very high levels of understanding.

But that's also not needed in most of the times. There will always be a "better" model... but that doesn't make other models "bad".

For my use-cases, open models are now almost on par with these top models... and it's only extremely rare that I genuinely "need" the help of top-of-the line closed models.