From a user perspective, I would consider Opus 4.6 somewhat of a regression. You can exhaust your the five hour limit in less than half an hour on, and I used up the weekly limit in just two days. The outputs did not feel significantly better than Opus 4.5 and that only feels smarter than Sonnet by degrees. This is running a single session on a pro plan. I don’t get paid to program, so API cost matter to me. The experience was irritating enough to make me start looking for an alternative, and maybe GLM is the way to go for hobby users.

I think there are two types of people in these conversations:

Those of us who just want to get work done don't care about comparisons to old models, we just want to know what's good right now. Issuing a press release comparing to old models when they had enough time to re-run the benchmarks and update the imagery is a calculated move where they hope readers won't notice.

There's another type of discussion where some just want to talk about how impressive it is that a model came close to some other model. I think that's interesting, too, but less so when the models are so big that I can't run them locally anyway. It's useful for making purchasing decisions for someone trying to keep token costs as low as possible, but for actual coding work I've never found it useful to use anything other than the best available hosted models at the time.