Gemma 4 27b and 32b feel pretty capable for text and visionn. Comparable with qwen, maybe a bit better on tool calling heavy tasks

I am not overly impressed with the smaller gemma models. And gemma 3 was a bit of a mixed bag, great at some things, bad at most others

Hard disagree, Qwen multimodal is way better than google's, but Gemma 31b runs laps around Qwen 27B in complex engineering tasks. Maybe Qwen is better at slopcoding web framework CRUD, but for embedded dev there's no comparison.

qwen3.6 was my favorite, then I tried the deepseek-v4-{flash,pro}

still making my way through deep dives on the chinese open weights, they are all pretty good and way more cost / resource effective