If it can do it, but unreliably, that's where you would get major gains from iterating. I think the Chinese models are in that sweet spot, for many tasks. I would love to test that.
I started working on my own fusion system yesterday. I'm not sure how to benchmark it though.
The thing I'm most interested in is reliability. Going from 90% to 95% on a benchmark doesn't seem like much but you've cut the error rate in half.
Out of interest: Was this still before CoT/thinking-mode became the norm?