i had a conspiracy theory that opus 3.5 was delayed last year because it was hard to get opus to be properly assistant-y. if that's true (and it's a big if), then i'm miffed that anthropic did manage to domesticate opus somewhat. i'm personally still pretty fond of opus 4, but i think the llm datascape will be noticeably worse off for not having the output of an "opus 3+" in it