True, and the time to completion thing is something i haven't seen much discussion of, because everything is sloooooow these days.

I've even considered the claude "fast mode" setting, but thats only 2x and at least 20x as expensive as the 5x plan so can't afford that atm for my company.

Peak for me was 4.6 and it just did stuff blazing fast, both Opus5 and Fable is way, way slower for me, breaks stuff, uses bizarre cryptic language. As i've said elsewhere in this thread to me it's pretty obvious there's huge downgrades because of economy with various "clever" fixes that makes them work, albeit slower and weirder, ie. you get less for what you pay increasingly over the last 6 months.

For me absolutely not. Fable 5 has been a step function change in the ability to hand off stuff to Claude. Opus 4.5 was itself a step function but I was still steering that significantly. Fable is one-shotting stuff that took multiple redirections in 4.5.