Yeah, I've definitely switched largely away from Flux. Much as I do like Flux (for prompt adherency), BFL's baffling licensing structure along with its excessive censorship makes it a noop.
For ref, the Porcupine-cone creature that ZiT couldn't handle by itself in my aforementioned test was easily handled using a Qwen20b + ZiT refiner workflow and even with two separate models STILL runs faster than Flux2 [dev].
Most of the people I know doing local AI prefer SDXL to Flux. Lots of people are still using SDXL, even today.
Flux has largely been met with a collective yawn.
The only thing Flux had going for it was photorealism and prompt adherence. But the skin and jaws of the humans it generated looked weird, it was difficult to fine tune, and the licensing was weird. Furthermore, Flux never had good aesthetics. It always felt plain.
Nobody doing anime or cartoons used Flux. SDXL continues to shine here. People doing photoreal kept using Midjourney.
Yep. It's pretty difficult to fine tune, mostly because it's a distilled model. You can fine tune it a little bit, but it will quickly collapse and start producing garbage, even though fundamentally it should have been an easier architecture to fine-tune compared to SDXL (since it uses the much more modern flow matching paradigm).
I think that's probably the reason why we never really got any good anime Flux models (at least not as good as they were for SDXL). You just don't have enough leeway to be able to train the model for long enough to make the model great for a domain it's currently suboptimal for without completely collapsing it.
Is Flux 1/2/Kontext left in the dust by the Z Image and Qwen combo?