> ...the new Gemini "replacement" is still by all accounts a disaster

Small nit: the initial rollout of Gemini was a dumpster fire. It is now quite good. For my use cases, I can't get any other current LLM to give me better results than Gemini 2.0 Flash. It's also free

But even that kind of proves your point, right? Pretend you 100% believe me without verifying. That means in a year or two the winner has transferred between ~3 companies. This is not a cheap mantle to keep passing around. The AI wars are going to get heated over the next year or two