GLM 5.2 was the first open model that I was happy to use as my main. It's a fantastic model. 5.3 cost a lot more per task, was slower and didn't get that much better results for me, so I tried 5.3 Flash for a bit, it was ok, but didn't feel as magical as 5.2 and I have now landed on DeepSeek 4.1 Flash as my main.

It's not just you-- the claudisms in 5.3 are pathetic and drive me crazy, I was very sad to see it go in that direction and consider it a big step down in that respect.

BUT OTOH the performance of 5.3-flash are impossible to argue with-- it has the same pathetic claude behavior full of "Honest" and "lever" and "load bearing" tripe... but it's scortchingly fast on hardware that is pretty slow running 5.2/5.3.

As a result I use 5.3-flash a lot, in spite of feeling kind of gross about its language. I don't enjoy using it the way I enjoyed GLM-5.2, but its pretty effective.

I don't think that's likely, given the close release dates of both? I wonder if 5.3 just choked on too much RL slop, independently of Opus 5.