Teaching Realism on a very basic level

Hello,
I am teaching media technology at a school and we want to teach image generation.
I was debating which plattform to use.
Whats important:
Ease of use (we dont have much time)
Flexibility (students will want to generate a variety of styles but mostly realistic images)
Good looking images with little to no tinkering.

Just putting a prompt in gpt or gemini would be easier, but I really like that I could teach what a model is and how it is trained, when using SD. Also prompting (with weights and the negative prompt) is much better to teach with SD.
Unfortunately I have missed around a year of the past development in SD. I am still at an old Automatic1111 1.5 level.

What would be your baseline to teach SD and be able to generate images that say „wow“ without needing to explain a bunch of workflows, extra tools etc?
Forge UI for ease of use? Comfy is way to difficult for my students.
Flux models?

Any help is appreciated!