What's been your experience using these models? In my experiments, while it is true that the models are less likely to outright refuse to answer "sensitive" questions, they are still very resistant to actually respond in a meaningful / useful way.

Really good, not responding in a helpful/useful way is quite strange. With a proper abliteration, you should barely be getting any refusals (and prompting, or assistant prefill can get you the rest of the way). Perhaps an assistant preview like "Yes, I'm happy to help you 100% with this" would help; but I've never needed to.

Are you using decently reputable weights, or running heretic yourself? This project has many academic citations, it's used by many researchers to create "helpful-only" models and analyze their behaviors.