It seems one is more specialized for the purpose and compare it against a general purpose LLM instead of a specalized/focused LLM?

This is like saying I compared this against photos for sure stored in a home swimming pool (CNN), compared to photos presumably stored in an ocean (generalized LLM).

I use LLMs where I can, but I'm no automatic fan of LLMs, a healthier comparison here seems to be what if a general purpose LLM was provided those CNN images, and perhaps what does a fine tuned local model with the CNN images perform like?

It still might not be better, but I would suspect it's closer, and a more realistic apples to apples comparison.

General assistant models compared to task specific models seem to be a well known spot where things don't always fit, but might be improving.