Then I guess all that it changes is that my proposed setup gets even better?

Huh? This is a new checkpoint. It has identical architecture, only different weights, and most likely just more post-training.

Much like Qwen 3.8 Next; which is qwen4-exp in a lot of the code/patches, there's usually a tick-tock cycle with LLMs. That said, it's hard to know for closed frontier models.