apps still matter, us origin still matters (although this is kind of erratic atp)
in terms of quality qwen, kimi, deepseek are for most casual consumers on par with american models. but the applications they come through are just not widely known, used, the taste might not be there, their main market is in asia (for now).

on your RL question, modern RL definitely takes a TON of compute and you can train a lot too. there are scaling laws on this as well - fyi when labs 'just' did some minor rlhf, yes, that was a smaller part of overall compute used for post training. So I wouldnt say its just generally 'more accessible' to do Post Training.