I genuinely think that any of the latest versions will be good enough. But my opinions on the main models are:
SDXL has almost caught up to Midjourney on people and faces. Loads of options to use it as well, including self-hosting if you're really going to be producing images at scale. It can produce text in images as well. I'd probably go with a trial on Dreamstudio first (you'll get some free credits to test it out) and just see what you think of the images. You can use specific styles (cinematic/anime/etc) without having to write a full prompt describing the style. And if you're wanting to get certain poses, or to create a scene based on a photo of a landscape, you can upload a reference image and set the noise so it can just about see the outline, then generate images with a prompt based on that. That feature is why I cancelled Midjourney and stuck with vanilla Dreamstudio.
Dall-E 3 is very impressive and completely free in Bing Chat, so it's worth using. Again, pretty much catching up to Midjourney for people and faces (although, it does seem a little more "cartoon-y", which I think may be a limitation OpenAI have put in to discourage deepfakes).
Midjourney does seem to be a lot easier to get what you're looking for, which may be down to the way they've trained it on human feedback. Their decision to produce 4 low res images at a time and then asking the user to upscale the ones they like was a stroke of genius. They have years and years of data of what outputs people liked and didn't like. So it's usually very easy to get exactly what you want by using Midjourney.
Plus, there are hundreds and hundreds of tools built on Stable Diffusion which have recently upgraded to XL. Supermachine is pretty good and has a lot of fine tuned models, there's a few (including one on Appsumo now, I can't remember the name) which allow you to generate consistent characters. So, if you want something where you just select a model and don't have to work too hard on the prompt you should be able to find it out there.
Personally, I think they're all good enough at pretty much anything now. There isn't really a "best" in my experience. I've chosen Dreamstudio, but I don't actually think it's better than any of the others, it just seems to work for me. Anytime prior to 6 months ago, I'd have said Midjourney was by far the best. But now, I'd probably say to try the free trial on Dreamstudio first, there's very little between that and Midjourney. But if you struggle to get what you want using Dreamstudio, then you'll probably have more luck on Midjourney.
