For me the issue is why there's not a new mini since 5-mini in August.

I have now switched web-related and data-related queries to Gemini, coding to Claude, and will probably try QWEN for less critical data queries. So where does OpenAI fits now?

Also interested in this and a replacement for 4.1/4.1-mini that focuses on low latency and high accuracy for voice applications(not the all-in-one models).

I think they just did that because of the energy around it for open source models. Their heart probably wasn't in it and the amount of people fine tuning given the prices were probably too low to continue putting in attention there.