Cranking up the reasoning effort seems be a trend recently and to me it looks desperate, like cranking up the wattage of a processor when you can’t get other, better gains.
Like yeah, you made it perform better, but I could’ve set any other model to xhigh and spent all the tokens and patience.
It’s surely enough to generate buzz for some headlines about “Fable-level performance”, but I would’ve expected people “in the know” to push back at this more.