I’m curious why you use this language of “appears to match or even beat”, seemed pretty clear from the benchmarks that it’s well ahead of Fable. Do you doubt the reporting?

I'm using both extensively at the moment and I've not yet found that either is demonstrably better at specific tasks than the other. They're both beasts!

(I've not had Fable do as much work in Blender as Astra yet though, and it's quite possible that Astra has Fable beat on 3D modeling.)

Maybe I can help with the curiosity - his own experience is probably that astra is close to fable, not miles ahead of it. Everyone has an opinion, and some people don't trust the benchmaxxed stats. Some of us just try it for our use cases and figure out which one we like best!

Fable still better for planning, Astra faster overall but misses things. Maybe that’s behaviour not raw intelligence but it’s noticeable

I doubt the reporting: I've found it to suck for productive work. Gone back to using Sol.