The tasks you actually need to do trump benchmarks, yes. I haven't tried out the ridiculously expensive models besides the latest Gemini, and it gave from equal to slightly worse results than latest DeepSeek, at a far higher price.

It does also seems Gemini's main problem wasn't that it was stupid, but that it was good at doing slightly different things than what I asked it to, very well. Which might well also have to do with me being better at wrangling DeepSeek's quirks than Gemini. Still, at that price tag, it's not worth it.