Go to Open Router, ask your own in investigative prompt that meets your needs to all the top open models. See how they do. Then notice if you can run any of those locally. Repeat at least once a month.

Thanks, BTW, now I have learned about OpenRouter.

It doesn't look like they have a way to filter down to "open" models. By this of course I mean "downloadable, local models".

I suppose if you know the "family" (Gemma, Qwen, etc.), I can just go to those models and test…

I've simply been pulling down what is popular from the LM Studio front end (and what runs on my hardware) and testing in situ.