Look into r/StableDiffusion and follow their prompts and download their ComfyUI workflows.

Thanks, I've done that, but with mixed results. I've also tried comfyui wrappers and alternatives that try to hide the complexity and just set sensible defaults, but I'm beginning to suspect its ultimately a consumer hardware vs million dollar NVidia server question.

What are you trying to generate? I've also noticed that local models aren't as good as cloud models due to hardware but there are still ways of optimizing the process.