So, one final appeal to logic from me here:

1) You must have tested and realized that these models can spell just fine - break a word into a letter sequence, regardless of how you believe they are doing it

2) As shown above, even when presented with a word already broken into a sequence of letters, the model STILL fails to always correctly count the number of a given letter. You can argue about WHY they fail (different discussion), but regardless they do (if only allowed to output a number).

Now, "how many r's in strawberry", unless memorized, is accomplished by breaking it into a sequence of letters (which it can do fine), then counting the letters in the sequence (which it fails at).

So, you're still sticking to your belief that creating the letter sequence (which it can do fine) is the problem ?!!

Rhetorical question.