Comment by motbus3

By differences in the release dates between 4.7 and 4.8 it seems it was more likely an attempted bugfix

But 4.8 still underperforms on most tasks. I have things running where 4o-mini does it considerably better repeatably.

They might have tuned it for a particular reason and I would not doubt that the harness has been made worse.

Sometimes it teases me to think it does wrong things on purpose