Outside of experience and experimentation, is there a good way to know what models are strong for what tasks?

See: https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard

Not really, it's like asking which C compiler was best back in the 90s.

You had Watcom, Intel, GCC, Borland, Microsoft, etc.

They all had different optimizations and different target markets.

Best to make your tooling model agnostic. I understand that tuned prompts are model _version_ specific, so you will need this anyways.