Qwen 3.5 draws local speed backlash

This is a useful signal about open-weight developer expectations, but not a cleanly sourced scandal story. The measurable part is local performance anxiety; the layoffs-and-sabotage narrative is rumor layered on top.

• –Qwen officially positioned Qwen 3.5 as a major new generation, so regressions in local throughput matter more than usual for power users running GGUFs and llama.cpp
• –Multiple recent community posts point to mixed or disappointing local speed on some Qwen 3.5 setups, which makes deployment friction a real adoption risk
• –For open-weight model families, tokens per second is not a side metric; it directly affects whether developers actually test, fine-tune, and recommend the models
• –Outside reporting confirms leadership changes around the Qwen team, but that does not prove the Reddit post's theory that slower models were a deliberate business move against local use