Paradoxically, while Astra gets things wrong in more spectacular ways and has generally lower ability to understand your intent than Fable, I'm finding it a lot better at having open-ended, high-level discussions. Fable often returns text that is meandering and not that illuminating (I've tested this both with and without my own changes to the system prompt), while Astra returns text that is more direct and gets to the point in clearer ways. Iterating on the same open-ended idea multiple times between both models still gets the best results, both of them generate insights that the other can't seem to generate, but if I had to choose only one it seems Astra would be it right now.