Have you tried Deepseek-R1?

I run it locally and read the raw thought process, find it very useful (can be ruthless at times) seeing this before it tags on the friendliness.

Then you can see it's planning process to tag on the warmth/friendliness "but the user seems proud of... so I need to acknowledge..."

I don't think Gemini's "thoughts" are the raw CoT process, they're summarized / cleaned up by a small model before returned to you (same as OpenAI models).