There are lightweight models as good as some heavier ones. It’s a bit like Intel’s tick-tock advertised process. Heavy memory-hungry models are “tick”, but there’s “tock”- say, “lfm2.5-thinking” model, the light version, in the ollama repository seems almost as good as qwen3.5 for me, except it’s very lightweight and lightning-fast compared to that.

These things are being optimized. It’s just that in the market capture phase nobody bothered.

That they are not being used correctly - yeah, absolutely, my idea of their proper use is some graph-based system with each node being processed by a select LLM (or just piece of logic) with select set of tools and actions and choices available for each. A bit like ComfyUI, but something saner than a zoom-based web UI. Like MacOS Automator application, rather.