Kimi K2.5 has also been superseded by a finer tuned Kimi K2.6 three weeks ago. Moonshot's Kimi models appear to be the favored Chinese model, at least for coding, and not Deepseek V4. z.AI's GLM 5.1 is also worth mentioning as rather competent for coding, also released in April.
Those models too will not be beating US AI labs by your metrics (although for coding, Kimi K2.6 might beat the very uneven Gemini depending on the situation), but in your critism at least consider the state of the art in your comparisons.
Even without the discount, I'll have to think about whether I need the 100 EUR tier of Anthropic Max, or whether downgrading to Pro and using DeepSeek is good enough. And they're also up on OpenRouter and other places.
Been using those models, not quite comparable with Opus 4.6/4.7 but with max reasoning, pretty good for a variety of dev tasks! Only big problem is no ability to process images, so can't really do browser use for some semi-automated testing, I'd have to write Playwright tests even when I don't want to.