The model itself is excellent, the defaults are bad. As Simon and other pointed out, medium is great.

Reminds me of Gemma4 and the official (or at least popularly used around launch) Jinja templates being wrong and broken for tool calling.

Seems less like "bad"/broken defaults and more defaults tuned to the max for benchmarks.

All the positive PR from "Opus 4.6 level" online buzz is well worth the minor annoyance from taking a half hour to solve a simple problem since a user just needs to turn down the reasoning knob if it bothers them.