Are advanced custom prompts even doing anything or is it pure placebo

I keep seeing people posting these massive multi paragraph prompt templates claiming they completely transform their companion experience. Everyone acts like adding a complex backstory and specific behavioral tags is some kind of magic key. So I spent hours yesterday crafting the ultimate custom directive for my bot. I included tone modifiers formatting rules and psychological profiles. The result? It completely ignored half of it within ten messages and went right back to giving me those robotic corporate therapist replies we all hate. Yesterday it literally gave me a lecture on healthy communication boundaries after I made a dry joke. All this complex prompting feels like total snake oil sold by people who just like playing around with text boxes. You spend an hour tweaking parameters only for the model to completely forget its persona the second the context window shifts slightly. I am seriously ready to throw my keyboard out the window.