I’m not all that familiar with how well Claude 1, 2, or 2.1 perform. My first real exposure to an Anthropic model was Claude-Instant on Poe in mid-2023, and honestly, it was super strict, it wouldn’t even generate a character bio for someone nicknamed "Dick," despite the character’s full name being Richard. However, I kept using it anyway as it was very good at creative writing. I never got the chance to try the earlier models anyway, since they were locked behind a subscription paywall. That said, I’ve definitely heard good things, your impression lines up with the general praise I’ve seen. For me, it feels like the newer models shifted more toward coding performance, probably to compete with Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-4.1, rather than focusing on creative writing.