> but I question how much folks are actually experimenting with what's out there

I did. Originally I had a project that I had been wanting to do and thought to use a decision model for it. Jev, OpenAI, etc. are all within percentage points of each other.

Then I used traditional ML and found a small classifier (gemma 4) with traditional embeddings worked 2x as well.

Jev is the general purpose ML pipeline for when you want average results. Nearly every application has a "better" option available with a small amount of work.