There's way more anxiety here than is necessary. If you don't want to optimize, then it's pretty simple right now, just use Opus 5.5 or GPT 6.1 Sol. If you want to quickly test out the alternatives and see if the decreased ability in long horizon tasks is offset by the decrease in costs, toss a few bucks into your favorite neocloud (Fireworks was fine last time I tried them) and give GLM 5.3 and Deepseek v4.1 a spin, and see if they're good enough. OhMyPi makes it trivial to swap models without swapping your harness.

Everyone has a great researcher piped to their desk now. You can have it follow the Twitter zeitgeist for you, you don't have to do it yourself.