Something I have been waiting for at least 8 months :D. It is great we now have something like this.

Yes, I had to tune it down as well.
I actually ended up with a different workflow from that which was suggested, as I think it is a bit too wasteful. Instead of generating the full image and using latent2latent to introduce new noise from the final version, I stop the generation at an intermediate step and finish it with the refiner model. I did it in the past to combine different sd1.5 checkpoints, and it does work here as well, since the latent space is shared across the two models.

I added an image with the alternative workflow in case someone wants to try it (hopefully metadata are preserved).

I am going to check that, thank you for the feedback!

Yes, I think this kind of “explorative evaluation” would not be possible in automatic1111.
From what I recall, it does not really give much control over the generation pipeline to the final user.
Admittedly it has been a while since I last used it, and I have no idea how good of flexible the SDXL integration is.

From what I understand both models could be trained

Yes, that is also my understanding.
Compared to the original SD1.5 it has so much potential for further extension, I am also confident many of these issues can be ironed out by the community.
And out of the box, base SDXL is very much better than base SD1.5, I am quite positive about that 😄 .

No, I never used the bot on discord.
As for the prompts, I still need to really understand how to best write them.
So far, I mostly used the same style I adopted in SD1.5 (without the Danbooru tags since they are clearly not supported).
I tried to be a bit more “expressive” but I have not really seen much of an improvement.
And words are still “bleeding”, so red eyes will often generate extremely red lips, or red clothes.