> I'm trying to wrap my head around exactly why so may people seem to want the best model available

To me this is a "more expectations mean more disappointment" situation.

Some people have higher expectations than others, and even the best model available is not good enough for what those people really want it to do once you start digging. In that light, the goal is not using the best model, but rather using the least insidiously deficient model.

Many people chase the edge because it's the least disappointing.

> when it has recently become clear that most halfway decent models can write damn good code for a fraction of the price.

The fatuousness of this statement pretty quickly becomes apparent if you spend more time looking at it, IMO, because the venn diagram of "damn good" and "not nearly good enough" strongly overlaps. Even the best model writing excellent lines of code still has noticeably deficient ability to decide which excellent lines of code to write. The goal is to improve the separation between them, not save a few dollars, because the emotional effort is worth more to us than the money.

> And the frontier models get nerfed constantly so you with open weight you can get something slightly less performant but way more stable.

Your minimization of performance differences and maximization of stability differences is exposing your biases.

Side note: I think you should know that to me at least some of what you said reads like self-rationalized moralizing. I couldn't help but imagine Principal Skinner saying "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." People don't only want different things than you do because they don't know what they're doing.