Workspace always gets things slower than normal Gmail accounts. They do a lot more to isolate data related to those accounts, so that's likely the cause here.

Anytime anything gets added to Workspace, I think Google has a lot more contractual obligations about keeping it around for X amount of time, so they tend to be more careful about adding things.

> I'm a paid Gemini subscriber via Workspace Standard accounts and yet I also only have access to 3.6.

Same and I have found it extremely annoying. I actually really like the Gemini models for question/answer stuff and reach for it before Claude (the other model family I have purchased) but it's getting long in the tooth at this point and I'm finding my Gemini usage shrinking to nearly 0.