No one is sleeping on nano-banana/Gemini Flash, it's highly over-tuned for editing vs novel generation and maxes out at a pretty low resolution.

Seedream 4.0 is somewhat slept on for being 4k at the same cost as nano-banana. It's not as great at perfect 1:1 edits, but it's aesthetics are much better and it's significantly more reliable in production for me.

Models with LLM backbones/omni-modal models are not rare anymore, even Qwen Image Edit is out there for open-weights.