The price difference to Deepseek models (deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp) is still significant while the performance difference is not.

But I'm fine paying +50% more for +5% increased performance because it will pay off.

Performance difference it large by all benchmarks. DeepSeek fell behind. It's Kimi K3 or GLM-5.3 now.

It still occupies a place on the Pareto frontier.

IMO Pareto frontier is a lie. At any given moment there's only one "best" strategy and my guess would be in most cases it is just using the best model.

Fable all day? Cost is not an issue for you then.