That's a pretty shallow dismissal, and I bet you $100 I can tell you which model I'm talking to between 4.6 and 4.8 without looking or asking after a handful of messages.

Anthropic famously had a terrible outage back when 4.6 was the latest and greatest, and it was never the same after it came back.

All evidence suggests they simply don't have the compute to keep serving their best models at their most powerful.