> Lastly, there is a massive difference in capabilities, determinism, and error handling between 5T SOTA models like Opus

What's your source for Opus being a 5T model?

> and tiny distillations from DeepSeek that perform well only in benchmarks.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Local models aren't “distillations from Deepseek”.

And they don't perform well “only in benchmarks”, Qwen 3.6 is a very decent model (obviously it's not Opus, but it's also much faster and speed is a quality of its own).