It's really not neck and neck with Opus 5.5.

Cost-adjusted,it might be ahead.

It's key to name the boundary conditions. Unlimited cost is a very HN assumption.

Max Subscription seems to be the HN assumption most of the time

Really depends on your use case.

You are right that there's plenty of use cases where Opus 5.5 is better.

If it depends on your use case then it’s not neck and neck…

Why? I'm pretty sure I can find use cases for which DeepSeek is better.

True, it isn't neck-and-neck. It's neck and balls. Deepseek's balls and Opus 5.5's neck. Whatever you can build with Opus 5.5, I can build in the same time, 1/500th the price with Deepseek Flash 4.1.