>For all the promise of control and customization SD boasts, Midjourney beats it hands down in sheer quality.

The results are comparable, but MJ in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409043 hallucinates more (look at the roofs in the second picture). And it cannot be fixed, maybe except for an upscale making it a bit more coherent. Until MJ obtains better tooling (which it might in the next iteration), it won't be as powerful. I'm not even starting on complex compositions, which it simply cannot do.

>OP posts results from a tuned model.

Yes, which is the first step you should do with SD, as it's a much smaller and less capable model.