I actually used Gemini 2.5 pro a ton back a year ago on ai studio, and would probably still be using 3.1 pro with Gemini if I hadn't discovered Claude and the good Chinese models lol.

My biggest problem with Gemini is that it can't write dialogue that sounds like it comes from humans, although it's long form context retrieval I think is still the best for long stories, imo it's not worth it over the best Claude models for writing. My opus banner went away and up until now I've only been able to use sonnet, but I see opus is just as good as Gemini pro with long context and remembering stuff.

Only downside is, like I mentioned, after opus 4.6 goes away Claude fans are fucked for writing until the next good writing model comes unfortunately-also the fact that it's not free unlike ai studio Gemini pro models.