Interesting. I've never tested o1-pro because it's insanely expensive but preview seemed to do okay.
I wouldn't be shocked if huge, expensive-to-run models performed better and if all the "optimized" versions were actually labs trying to ram cheaper bullshit down everyone's throat. Basically chinesium for LLMs; you can afford them but it's not worth it. I remember someone saying o1 was, what, 200B dense? I might be misremembering.
I'm positive they are pushing users to cheaper models due to cost. o1-pro is now in a sub menu for pro users and labled legacy. The big inference methods must be stupidly expensive.
o1-preview was and possibly still is the most powerful model they ever released. I only switched to pro for coding after months of them improving it and my api bill getting a bit crazy (like 0.50$ per question).
I don't think paramater count matters anymore. I think the only thing that matters is how much compute a vendor will give you per question.