With 32gb VRAM you should be able to run Qwen3.8-27B at either Q5 with 262k context, or Q6 with 200k context. Additionally you probably want Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) either in your harness or the server (e.g., in Open WebUI). Admittedly I've only enabled web search in my harness (OpenCode supports the Exa search API by default) and use straight llama-server.

As far as next step in quality being 256gb, that's largely correct. Qwen 27B is currently the best model for 32gb VRAM, and you don't get better models at a reasonable speed until 256gb.