The most telling detail here isn't the near-perfect score — it's that some 'failures' turned out to be errors in the experts' own reference solutions. When the ground truth itself is unreliable, benchmark saturation stops being a clean signal, and evaluation becomes the real bottleneck. The 'taste' argument is a familiar one from mathematics, and it's plausible: choosing which problem matters is harder than solving a given one. But we'd be cautious about treating taste as a permanent moat — it may simply be the next capability to fall once agents can iterate against real experiments rather than static problem sets. The $2.40 price point is the quieter bombshell: research-grade reasoning priced like a coffee, with obvious consequences for how physics PhDs justify years of training. Worth watching whether TheoPhysEval holds up under independent scrutiny.