This is completely irrelevant without knowing if you are effectively prompting each model. Your workflow may just be suitable for a particular model and not others. And tuning a workflow for each model is tedious. I seriously doubt there is ANY class of problem DSR1 can solve that OAI's third tier model can't at this point (o4-mini).

Better how? DeepSeek has never held the top spot in any aggregated benchmark. The Chinese bot armies are certainly better at convincing the internet they are trailing western models, despite the fact that in practical use this is not the case and at this rate, likely will never be. If AI progress is exponential, so is falling behind. What doesnt change however, is holding your ace card and dropping it when the time is right. China is competing with the public western models. Western SOTA labs are competing with their previous unreleased SOTA model. Publicly, China is ~3 months behind. But in reality, they are much further behind, and will never catch up.

Be mindful of what this means. A kid in his garage fine tuning a model can "catch up" to SOTA models for most use cases. For actual "frontier" work that requires SOTA levels of intelligence, there are only 3 companies in the race. None of them are from China or Europe.