Totally agree. I've been using cheap Chinese open-source models via OpenCode Go, and they are faster, cheaper and in my experience arrive at the solution quicker because they are more pragmatic.

Yesterday Codex was making a big issue out of a new module that was upgraded in our cluster and because of which the same SSH key would be "regenerated" by Terraform. No big deal, it just truncates a newline at the end of the SSH key and it works all the same. But not being aware that this, as an example, is unimportant can cost a lot more time than using the big models saves.