O3 is 80% cheaper and introducing o3-pro

I think you mean “minutes”, not “ms”.

A simple input of one image to o3 pro and a small token billing was an extensive wait.

I suspect that “no flex processing discount” is because that is already being done by “inference efficiencies” also coming to this model: if you’re willing to wait for a long response, you’ll also be waiting behind other jobs transparently for fitting the API call into a queue…