Are you saying they reduced the quality of the model in order to save compute? Would it make sense for them to offer a premium version of the model at at a very high price? At least offer it to those willing to pay?

It would not make sense to reduce output quality only to save on compute at inference, why not offer a premium (and perhaps perhaps slower) tier?

Unless the cost is at training time, maybe it would not be cost-effective for them to keep a model like that up to date.

As you can tell I am a bit uninformed on the topic.