Gemini's guardrails are unnecessarily strict. As you mentioned, there's a topical restriction on election-related content, and another where it outright refuses to process images containing anything resembling a face. I initially thought Copilot was bad in this regard—it also censors election-related questions to some extent, but not as aggressively as Gemini. However, Gemini's defensiveness on certain topics is almost comical. That said, I still find it to be quite a capable model overall.