If required, so far I'm not impressed with newest proprietary. i have a claude sub mostly rotting at this point, so i come back from time to time until the year long sub expires, but at this stage i will not renew and see no point in doing so.
I was seriously underwhelmed by the previous generation, reminded me of the hype around gpt2 being too dangerous to live from the same people.
At least Gemini 4 Argon has made writing the front ends I hate and don't care about a breeze.
I have no idea how much that's worth to other people, but it's more than worth the account or three I use.
Have you tried Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1? They're still better than any of the available open-weights models. (And rumors are Fable 5.5 is coming out tomorrow or next week.)