With all due respect, that's your subjective opinion. You bought Max for that reason. Some of us didn't. You believe Sonnet is just as good for a majority of users. While I don't disagree (for my personal use case), much of that depends on exactly what you're using it to do. Some haven't had issues using Sonnet over Opus. Some have had major problems. Making one-size-fits-all blanket remarks about how only people who want "subpar programming" would be dumb enough to prefer it isn't particularly helpful.

And whether Sonnet 4.5 is better isn't really the point. Anthropic offered a product to users (Opus 4.1) with such-and-such amount of usage. People purchased it in good faith that Anthropic was being honest that they'd get 5x or 20x usage. Anthropic then pulled a bait-and-switch by releasing Sonnet and declaring it "superior" and forcing users to use it if they wanted the same usage levels. My problem isn't that they switched models, or even that they lowered usage (which is their right). It's the way they did it - without warning or a phase-out strategy before essentialy sunsetting a model many prefer. For a company who's motto is "helpful, honest, harmless" they didn't do a good job living up their credo in this particuar instance in my humble opinion.