I confirm that 34B models don’t appreciate the standard roleplay preset; they require the USER:/ASSISTANT: format.
…and that Nous-Capybara-34B-GGUF is excessively verbose for roleplay. It is suffering from verbal diarrhea, the outputs become longer and longer over time, despite using Author’s notes, etc., to instruct it to be more concise.
Looks great. Your method would also have the advantage of not hurting the syntax - how many models forget the last * or " because of RepPen?