While it may not compare to the closed, corporate "frontier" models that are running each query on racks upon racks of servers worth millions of dollars in a corporate data center, it's not clear to me that's a reasonable comparison. Mistral is actually one of my personal favorite models and it has nothing to do with being French (although that is a huge bonus, it doesn't really contribute to my method of scoring and ranking of different models). It's simply more reliable and consistent than a lot of the other open-weight models, it follows directions well and has good task comprehension. Even with abliteration (guardrail removal) it doesn't generally have weird artifacts and it uses diverse, clear and reasonable language in its responses. It also handles Markdown really nicely in a very consistent way without needing guidance. To me, these are more important properties than simply "containing the most recent training data" or how many agents it has. At the end of the day I'm going to judge a model based on its output more than how it gets there and it turns out you don't need all the latest whiz-bang features to get acceptable output depending on what exactly you're doing with it.
It may not be as technically impressive as even the latest greatest open-weight models like Qwen, but it's still a great model whether it's French or not, and I would still use it just as often as I already do even if it were Chinese or North Korean or Russian I don't care, all that matters is that it's open-weight, runs with reasonable hardware requirements, is flexible in how it can be used, and produces good output. Mistral ticks all the boxes.
Oh god no, the reason I use TUI is to get away from all this graphical rendering shit. What's wrong with ASCII art? If your TUI is too much for even bloated Unicode to handle, you've probably already wandered into the lands of the GUI and you should probably just be honest with yourself and stay there.