Agreed on the HR project. 1.34.0 has an opt-in switch for part of that, under Slow self-hosted providers in Settings: with it on the move is refused with a "check is still running" message instead of going through. I haven't tested it, and it only covers a slow model. I didn't find anything for a plain error like a wrong token, that still fails open.

On latency, the model's own answers took 0.6 to 0.8 s at about 100 to 110 tok/s, and Send for Review took roughly 2.3 to 3.4 s end to end, apart from one 6.4 s first refusal I couldn't explain. I only ran that one model, so no MoE vs dense comparison.

Pinning I didn't test. All I have is 2.8 s for the first call of my session and 12 s on an idle model in our video run. Your guess that it matters is plausible, and 12 s against a 20 s validator limit is close enough to be worth checking.