Model retirement will push people towards open weight models where they can stay with a model for as long as they desire.
It's retiring them, since there will be more models to choose from by then.
Currently you feel that GPT-5.5 has advantages over all newer models (it asks more and therefore uses less tokens to solve a task). Within the next days the additional GPT-6 models come out. They won't ask as much as GPT-5.5 (but maybe you could also just add this to the default prompt). But cheaper models of GPT-6 will actually be better than GPT-5.5.
Yeah, that makes sense. It’s still questionable what better means in that context. It will for sure be more intelligent in a way but I just think the newer models don’t behave as nicely as 5.5 did in a agentic setting. What I mean is that 5.5 just found the best middle ground between doing things independently while still not doing more than I asked for.