This really very much depends on how you are using it, I think. If you intend to leave it to solve long context problems and write whole prototypes, the 27B is going to be much better.

But if you are sort of pair-programming with the model, the speed obviously matters and I think then the 35B is acceptably smart, and when it's wrong it'll be wrong much more quickly. It seems very good on SQL and PHP, and I assume on typical JS and Python.

I would rather work that way, so I hope they do produce a small MoE model.

I had no idea. Where can we learn stuff like this?

Learn about MoE models and also just look at the benchmarks of the two models. For example https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/qwen3-6-27b... clearly shows both the intelligence and speed differences. It's a bit degenerate but you can get some useful info from e.g. the /r/localllama subreddit