I do enjoy a good stream of consciousness rant, so thanks for that.
A simple rejoinder - The OP is one solution to many households where they can just be "the human tutor". If you can't see that, you simply don't know the average household.
That's not the direction of LLM progress these past 2 years. Cost has always decreased per unit intelligence. Open weight models with lower parameters beat gpt4 that we were so impressed by.
Fable is kind of fantastic on the difficult tasks. if it's something eithe rmodel can do then you can't see the difference. Fable also makes much less mistakes. It's a more relentless, proactive problem solver.