Image quality downgrade, which produces almost unusable results

Hi,
It would appear that there has been a downgrade to the image quality. As you can see within the images provided, it starts off like it is going to create a high quality image and, as the image finalises, the quality drops, becomes blurry, smudged and less crips. This is with any prompts which ask for tone, shading, shadows etc. If you want to create flat images, it turns out a little better but still with smudges and less quality. Is there any progress on fixing this issue? As someone who uses image generation to create artwork for educational purposes, I need the quality we had just some weeks ago or it becomes unusable for my purpose. Thanks in advance for any feedback.