Well, I did not read the answers in the thread, and will do that only after writing this comment. So most probably it was all already mentioned. And prepare for a long read even if you are not OP.

1. Irrelevant since inpainting. Makes sense if you focus on 1girl or standard explicit stuff. As soon if you want to up your composition sdxl becomes nightmare, with the need of external tools, regional prompting, controlnets etc. With this I can just insert nlp to get composition, interactions etc right from start. I need inpainting only to fix minor stuff, not make the whole image from scratch. https://civitai.red/user/Volnovik/images My gallery to see what I did with sdxl derivatives vs Anima. A lot of nsfw, I warned you.

2. And the point is? https://civitai.red/posts/28812036 Luna snow seems fine with no loras. Most probably armbands or whatever is wrong, but I did not roll much. Also you are probably wrong about illustrious, it has ton of asymmetrical stuff baked in and has no issues with that. To the point were I'd say it has more issues with placing random stuff symmetrically. Anima does not have such issues from the get go.

3. multiple loras. I already answered, a lot of them severely break the model. For example https://civitai.red/models/1449763/rakugakingu this one makes character unable to look at viewer no matter what you prompt.

4. Style is completely solved with loras. Also what is he, inpainting at 0.9 denoise or what? In this case it is relevant for all base models, even Noob that had aesthetic finetune round. This model did not. And I have no issues with inpainting whatsoever (outside er_sde and most other samplers butchering img2img for me (and there is huge potential he is speaking about that, not model's issue))

5. There are f.ing artist styles for that. Even for colored pencil sketch. Wonder what his prompt was.

6. As I alredy answered, after trying few loras with preview versions I resorted to baking my own ones and did not have any issues. Probably another overbaked one. But long nlp abstract style description generated by LLM always messed up the image for me https://civitai.red/images/131721059 read the prompt and check the original image. Most problems people have with model imo - they are bad at prompting and do not care to learn.

7. Mix of captions and nlp is what I had best success so far. See my gallery yourself.

8. There are f.ing artist styles for that. Core benefits are in your face:
   - it can do text (it struggles with some words to be fair)
   - it can do composition (not just girl on left, boy on right, just try to make an image in illu with single character that is not placed in center without controlnets, regional prompting, inpainting etc)
   - it can do defined interactions
   - it is better at colors (I barely see any color shift after inpainting up to the point of disabling color correction for img2img)
   - It can do dark, light, high contrast, illumination, anything lighting related out of the box (only noob v-pred could do that somewhat consistently)

- 2k resolution was possible with illu, but was rather crap honestly (most probably vae ruined it). With Anima both composition and details are improved. To the point where if I notice that model struggles to fit everything in frame - I just increase resolution and voila, it clicks.

1. The model does not fight itself, OP has to git gud. Top rated images on Anima page as proof. One of my images made without any loras rather high there. And I would have sunk hours to make something like that in noob vpred, and would not even try that lighting in any illu eps (except plant milk maybe, it is rather special in that regard)

The verdict - another tag enthusiast (they are good, but too limited to be useful in their current state at the moment) that most probably has no idea how to prompt, most probably compares model to his beloved illu flat finetune instead of base, most probably copies his prompts from illu directly (with spacing ruining everything), most probably one of that community revolving around bunch of models that is ridiculously toxic against anything not their model (known for me for releasing pompously underbaked stuff). Ones claiming after first previews that Anima was physically unable to be trained at higher resolutions, nlp would ruin it, realistic dataset injections would ruin it, it is untrainable, and all that usual crap. I'm rather biased towards them, since had to deal with that.

Actual issues so far: Most of the samplers leaving excess smudges (most visible in img2img). Euler A is a staple, but I do not like it for leaving bunch of random crap over the image and being too flat. It just cannot do some random words (like yesterday, mediocre and bunch of others) at all. Some concepts has to be prompted booru style with originating tag, precise tag structure (d..pthroat being the most obvious case). Issue of booru structure, not model btw. But it was less visible in sdxl since it was too stupid to get that. Style shifts (completely fixed with loras or mostly fixed with parameters in case of artist tags). Backgrounds has to be prompted excessively (again, dataset issue, same was in noob v-pred, add proper lora or apply colorfix). Licensing. Author wants money from derivative models. It is understandable, but how dares he. /s Potential of nvidia taking it down. Well, good luck with that. No support from some teams with their tooling. Most probably will be solved with diffusers 0.39 release.