Complete anecdote, and nothing to do with relative nerfing or not: Opus 5.5 has been surprisingly good for me (including the past couple hours), especially for following research-level questions/directions.
Its quite worrisome honestly and i feel like that 'im in danger' Simpsons meme more and more. Right now i still have a lot of domain expertise which helps in knowing which questions to ask and which problems to solve, but well, i wonder how long that is going to save my job.