I think these "Flash" models are sort of an evolutionary dead end. Sure, there are some routine tasks and applications where they can be used. But for the actual novel development work? It's much better to run a big model at high power for 30 mins than watch the Flash model struggle for 2 hours and produce massive churn.

Same reason your phone has a few big CPU cores for real work, it's much better to "race to idle" than have an "efficient" core struggle. Shitty experience, shitty power efficiency.