For me Sol is less efficient than Astra - Sol makes many avoidable mistakes and has issues with context compaction - sometimes it goes haywire after a couple compactions.

Agreed on the “being dumbed down” observation. It appears they’re most powerful at release time and then are gradually “optimized” so every new model feels more powerful. But there’s no evidence on routing to a deployment with other weights. It would be plausible to do so though at least at peak times.