So it has been a bit for this checkpoint, but version 3 is finally ready for some sharing. The images do not come across as soft and the VAE that is baked in is: https://huggingface.co/madebyollin/sdxl-vae-fp16-fix

I decided to use this VAE because it seems to do better and run faster. Overall I have enjoyed the results. I hope you do as well.