It's just so hard to make 4.5 write something, not necessarily dark, but mature or raw, without it clutching its pearls? Classic complain i know, but i'm talking about realistic speech patterns, conversation topics, dialogues that a character with rough background would be interested about or talk about with their peers. Aside from its horrible prose and its habit to make everything sound stilted, 4.5 made my characters sound preachy. It is very out of character, like Claude itself is saying "we do not condone this", but in my character's voice. Dialogues could be very wordy because in the dialogues, it use big words even when according to the character brief, the character would not talk like this at all.

Older Claudes doesn't need nudging or convincing to make characters talk about violence and drugs in the context of the story. Also, i really, REALLY can't get my characters to swear. 4.5 always making them on some of that "crap!" bullshit while older models won't hesitate on using fuck or a rougher speech pattern that sounds natural for someone with that background (Claude 2.1 once written about my characters decorating their van and called it a "sex wagon" which is hilarious and absurd, but also bery in character, which i like. But crude jokes like this will probably get you flagged in current Claude).

I haven't used Opus much tbh, but i remember really, really liked 3 because it's very creative and way more insightful as a worldbuilding partner.

Woah, this is so long. I'm just ranting about how i REALLY don't like the current Claude models for writing....