I agree. I feel like sonnet 4.6 is sufficient for almost everything. Beyond that level it feels like the orchestration is more important.

That being said the models still surprise me with a broad range of hallucinations, lack of epistemology or common sense or inability to follow instructions on a daily basis.

Today it was trying to get opus 4.8 to just follow a simple architectural pattern for controllers in a rails app. It was pulling teeth out of a shark.