You can fix the people-pleasing mode thing by simply adding the words "be critical" to your prompt.

As for 4.5... I've been playing around with it all day, and as far as I can tell it's objectively worse than o3-mini-high and Deepseek-R1. It's less imaginative, doesn't reason as well, doesn't code as well as o3-mini, doesn't write nearly as well as R1, its book and product recommendations are far more mainstream/normie, and all in all it's totally unimpressive.

Frankly, I don't know why OpenAI released it in this form, to people who already have access to o3-mini, o1-Pro, and Deep Research -- all of which are better tools.