alt Hacker NewsKrea-2 is fantastic. If you can get around the restrictive license, output speed, and JSON prompting, Ideogram 4 probably comes the closest to SOTA models. See my profile for GenAI Showdown, where it's benched against other local and proprietary models.
It actually scored above Gemini 2.5 (aka the original NB) which is pretty impressive.
Public AI benchmarks are fucking stupid and can be completely ignored. Too gamed.
However, your advice is right. KREA2 and Ideogram4. The latter being less commercially usable without what I would surely assume is a pain in the ass.