Not disagreeing with your argument, but:

> If you want a good dense model, use qwen3.6 27B instead, speed will be up, and if you don't take my word for it being smarter, take openrouter's prices of it against the bigger, slower and less memory-efficient gemma do the talking.

Don't know if this is the correct read. I think those providers are simply taking cue from Alibaba's first-party pricing for the 27B Dense. It's kinda overpriced imo. Perhaps it can be explained by how 'reasoning-inefficient' (relative to frontier models or even Gemma) the Qwen models are and longer sequence lengths are expensive to serve.