I treat OpenRouter as a central point to access specific providers. Pinning is a given for that use case. I’ve tried using un-pinned models and the experience

I treat OpenRouter as a central point to access specific providers. Pinning is a given for that use case. I’ve tried using un-pinned models and the experience is exactly as you described: Some providers are so unreliable that the majority of requests fail. Some providers do weird things like abruptly end the response (which I get billed for and have to re-submit). Some providers are clearly running heavily quantized versions of the model because their eval performance is terrible. Some providers advertise features on OpenRouter but will reject those requests when submitted to their API. So pinning is the way to go.