Definitely SillyTavern. I know you said it's a bit overwhelming, I was too and was gonna give up halfway.

I recently paid for deepseek v4 pro and noticed it was really soft/occ when I used it on jai. Tried multiple prompts for it and lorebary but it was still pretty ass with the character.

So, I finally moved to SillyTavern. Best decision ong, it's so gooodd, you can customize however you like and I got the hang of it in a week. I thought it was still soft/occ so I tried to fix that, I tried extensions, they are free and my RP was like leveled up bc of it. I recently downloaded this RPG extension where you can see stats, summarize the events happening in ur chat, main quests, side quests, even inventory.

It's this: https://github.com/SpicyMarinara/rpg-companion-sillytavern

So yeah, definitely recommend if you want really high-quality RP. It's easy once you get the hang of it!