You can remove early voting from leaderboard and they are no longer the same.
Usually, it's because all else failed, and I have to resort to burning Tokens with more expensive/better models, so a few minutes here and there really should not matter.
I've seen this myself too: DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is really good and incredibly cheap at constrained implementations, searches, etc. However, frequently the implementations don't take into account all possible cases they should cover. Then I'm either forced to step in and steer it very precisely, or have a heavier model review and provide detailed feedback. I've had good success with this mixed workflow using GPT 6.1 Sol as reviewer. Then my work focuses mostly at the beginning (architecture, goals, constraints), and at the end (final review or very quick intermediate reviews). I'm not aware of benchmarks that simulate this kind of mixed workflow with different models.
In fact, I barely see a difference between the results at all. The models being tied smells correct to me.
I didn’t try 3.1 yet, though.