In support of your march of VAE uprising, I did some fundamental research. With no negative prompt at all and only a very basic positive prompt:

VAE - Mostly black and white combinations of abstract art, female androids and occasionally a woman painted in a sea of colors

VAE Uprising - Spectacular war scenes that could be cover art of a book or a film poster, for some reason a lot of the heros depicted have angel wings

Adorable VAE - Cute babies, I wouldn't really count on support from them

Finally my favorite one

Pretty VAE - Lots of doll like pink princesses with lots of fancy jewelry (I might post a few of them later)

Hope it helps in your efforts to bring the VAE to the masses ;-)

Remember like diamonds, VAEs are forever!

@Afroman4peace I was afraid you would ask me that ;-) SDXL in general has some strengths over 1.5. Closeup faces and variety in faces are strong points, text is now somewhat possible still far from predictable what you get. It is faster when running at high-resolutions, but 1.5 has much longer fine-tuning history and lots and lots of loras and embeddings available. So better as your 1.5s I would have to answer yes, no, maybe, probably likely, but not sure ;-)

What I did notice (both realistic, but also in puppetry/doll stuff) with this model (not sure if general sdxl issue or your merge. My clear lack of grounded experience with sdxl model testing is shining through here). Some of the hands, although 5 fingered and fine in general, sometimes have this "shadow" finger. It is kinda hard to explain, but were you expect to be a shadow of the hand/fingers there is an extra finger basically below the hand itself. Or the index finger splits into two separate fingers, one goes straight and the other is kinda wedged in the empty space between the normal fingers. Of course it always happens during weird prompt experiments so I don't have any clear examples to share at the moment unfortunately.

@Afroman4peace I found an example of the extra finger problem in one of your examples as well. The green fairy druid girl reading a book in front of a stone building (with the dear-mouse? cute little bastard! in the background). I know you tried to distract me with partial nudity, but I did pay attention to the hands (eventually) and on her left hand you see the effect. Reasonable 4 fingers (thumb is ofc invisible behind the book) and then you have this extra finger going horizontally from basically nowhere. I've seen that a few times. And yes I know hands are difficult etc, but this SDXL and should fix ALL our problems ;-) Yes? Yes!

@Afroman4peace Yes the sufferings we need to endure - for science. For example can you imagine having 100 generated pictures of equally pretty princesses, that you HAVE to look at in detail to select the best ones for upload. Inspecting every little detail of their beautiful jewelry - for science, of course. I guess once people realize the sufferings we as model makers have to endure, I'm sure libraries full of books will be written about it ;-) I wish you all the strength that may be required. Stay strong!