Maybe they optimized it really hard for small models. That would be impressive, but hardly a good selling argument. I want a harness that can do both and OpenCode looks just fine for that purpose (and it also has everything else I need).
To me this looks like another case of bundling things that shouldn’t be bundled (the harness with the UI) making both worse off because you can’t individually focus on each component. They’ve done this before, bundling a decent UI with decent inference for IMO no good reason, combining the downsides of each instead of letting people mix+match.