SDXL is big improvement over 1.5 & 2 for a base model. I'm hoping it sees a lot of community adoption... seeing as everyone ignored v2.
Discussion
Yep. I was disappointed by the Beta but the production one is great. Not sure how flexible it is though. Many things looks a bit samey.
1.5 used OpenAI CLIP which then 2.0 and SDXL used OpenClip, which is an open source version of CLIP.
Open clip was underwhelming at first but now it has reached a distinctive quality of its own, and its wholly open source.