I really like Gemma 3. Some quantized version of the 27B will be good enough for a lot of things. You can also take some abliterated version[0] with zero (like zero zero) guardrails and make it write you a very interesting crime story without having to deal with the infamous "sorry but I'm a friendly and safe model and cannot do that and also think about the children" response.

[0]: https://huggingface.co/mlabonne/gemma-3-12b-it-abliterated