The price for Flash has stayed the same since April when v4 was released. I just checked it yesterday because I also thought DeepSeek increased their prices too much. The only time Flash was increased was briefly in August. But there's new peek pricing (double the price) during Chinese hours so yeah, it's a bit increased after all, but not much.
I would describe better as how much of my work I can delegate to the agent. Right now I'm delegating much more to Astra high than 6 months ago to Opus 4.6. Every dev has this feeling, it's weird to even argue what a better model/harness means.