Practitioners are deliberately downgrading to Claude 4.6 over verbosity.

A 233-upvote r/ClaudeAI post argues the previous generation was better for routine work, with the complaint being conversational chatter rather than reasoning quality. A separate 63-upvote thread reports Fable 5 losing track of a schema decision it had itself flagged across a long planning session. Neither is measurable, both are single-community sentiment. But people choosing an older model over verbosity is a signal I'd want if I shipped release notes.