WTH is going on now with Perplexity Research?

I've been a longtime user of Perplexity's Research mode and I'm increasingly fed up. A couple weeks ago, I discovered the new monthly quota of 20 (?), meaning I had no queries left a week into my monthly cycle. Now it's working again and the output doesn't mention any quota – so is there still a quota or not?

The problem now is that the output has become trash. My main use case was to paste a bunch of news headlines, ask it to research those developments, and draft a summary. When you subscribe to an AI service, you expect it to improve over time, but this one has declined dramatically. It often strings headlines into a paragraph without actually performing research ( I need to follow with an explicit ask)...lately the synthesis has been sloppy and forced.

The output today is the strangest yet, containing introspection about the task itself ("The request relies on accessing and reviewing the full content of 30+ specific news articles dated around 20–26 February 2026 to verify exact event dates and synthesise themes...") followed by a few brief blurbs about the difficulty of accessing the articles.

I'm now using the free GLM-5 chatbot itself, which is certainly better than this (but not as good as Deep Research used to be). Are they trying to infuriate users?