Meh distillation doesn't mean you can create an existing model from scratch of similar quality. It's the AI equivalent of making a VHS copy of a video, it doesn't enable you to make your own movies very well and post training is the equivalent of video editing, which again, doesn't let you make your own movies very well.

Your seeing the AI labs respond by never publishing chain of thought now and in the future, I see them not even publishing their top models as a general purpose API and instead using it to drive their own AI apps, which will obscure even more model output. Anthropic Mythos was internal only for many months for example.