I am losing my mind with FOMO and need some sanity checking about model capabilities

The constant onslaught of new models and drops and releases and hardware price increases and civitai bans and now the ITAR restrictions I am becoming fixated on preparing my local data centre that I cannot afford to purchase or power.

I recall when GPT 3.5 dropped thinking to myself “this is all I’ll ever need” and i truthfully think this is correct. Looking at the projects I created with it back then and now, and in terms of complexity, they haven’t increased as the abilities of models has gone up.

I’m looking for some sanity in a non benchmarked way. What local models (if any) provide the same power of the big closed models of the past?

I am doing things with Gemma 4 12b that I think are astonishing, I had it inside hermes go and stand up my private gitea server and retrieve all the nightmareclipse exploits for safe keeping, and it..just did it. Thats amazing! But it doesn’t feel amazing because there’s always a stronger model, a bigger bit of hardware, more prams, a higher quant, more I could be buying to make it perform better (but will it?)

I think this is starting to read like someone losing their mind and I might be, I’m just kind of pretty disillusioned about the state of play rn, I was saving for a 6000 and then the enormous price jump takes that out of the realm of possibility of anytime soon.

I’m not really sure what I’m hoping to achieve here. I have a bad feeling the answer may well be “gpt 3.5 is kimi 2.5 1T, gg bozo”. The sane question is obviously “if Gemma 4 is doing things for you why do you need more” and I don’t have an answer other than real fomo i suppose.