Any reason NOT to buy the most-souped-up 13 AMD? Upside of lower tiers?

This is difficult to answer since the worth of a dollar/euro/whatever is personal. I can afford to buy the top model every 3 years but still don’t since in my estimation the step up in price from the second best CPU to the very best CPU is quite ridiculous if you do not run your system at full power frequently. As a programmer i’m pretty much doing text processing and browsing 80% of the time. I’ve picked 32GB of ram so I can run a few VMs easily, but the top CPU did not make sense for me.

You are probably right. I just found ryzenadj and went to a 43W (hard limit) constant load. See [TRACKING] PPD changes have no effect after suspend on AMD until reboot - #16 by Justin_Weiss

TLDR, cinebench R23 went from 13818 to 14874 with unlimited cooling. There is serious throttling due to the chassis temperature triggering skin burn protection. The laptop body needs more room to breathe to sustain the TPD. CPU temperatures are fine.
I suspect GPU bound scenarios might benefit more from this.

You managed to go above 35 on the long term limit with ryzenadj? Mine only let the short term one go that high, lasts long enough for a couple cb15 runs for my power/performance map but pl throttles after that.

Point a fan at the underside of the laptop. Even a small one.

Turns out I was wrong too, I can indeed set the long term limit to 43 but it thermal throttles to 35, I was just looking at the wrong sensor. My bad

This little exercise did get me in a testing mood though so I am currently running tests with different thermal limits and fixed fan speeds so I can compare with ptm7950 (not doing lm jet and if the ptm performs well maybe not even at all)

That’s intentional, the lowest RAM model is just for the show to keep the price tag low, and the price difference of a 16GB ram model compared to 8GB one is about buying 96GB socketed RAM(s)

You can manually set the fan to 100% to reduce the clockdown and maintain a slightly higher sustained clock speed