People are arguing with you that tokens are "real" - they miss the point. You cannot predict how much "tokens" you will spend for a given prompt.

That's the problem you're highlighting, we are charged for a metric we cannot estimate before buying to make an informed decision how many we want to spend vs the quality of the outcome.

The charge and quality is arbitrary, and we can't trace if we actually spent as much as we were charged for.

Anyone who waffles about tokens being real - I believe missed your point.