This one's interesting, and I think the next frontier for LLMs should really just be, how can we get something like Opus 4.6 to cost drastically less, for the same output? I say 4.6 because from 4.6 onwards it's been pretty darn good, at least for me, always feels like every model upgrade someone hates it, heck even 4.5 was fine.
I agree on opus 4.5-4.8, but Fable 5 was a noticeable upgrade.
Yes - I want that and dramatically faster. Newer models don't seem to need any more or less guidance and iteration, so let's make the time-to-wrong-answer as short as possible.