>>56547203i would say that if you're going to be paying, the best bang for your buck is probably claude 3.5 sonnet. it's nearly as good as opus is, but for a fifth of the price. opus is flat out not worth it unless you're a richfag, it's by far the most expensive model around.
3.5 haiku is supposed to be releasing this year, and will almost undoubtedly take the budget model crown, so look forward to that. 3.5 opus is coming too, but... if it's not any cheaper than it's still not going to be worth it.
also, for purely SFW stuff i find chatgpt-4o-latest to be very good as well. unfortunately jailbreaking it for NSFW destroys its prose and turns it into generic GPT garbage, which it looks like you already experienced. if you're into NSFW, either use a very minimal preset and model swap for lewding or avoid it entirely.
i've also heard not-terrible things about the newer google gemini models, and you can supposedly use them on the GCP free trial. might be worth looking into.
