What I’ve noted is this. When it comes to musical instruments, mankind has been and will continue to be almost totally dependent on nature and pure chance at discovery. Be it a piano violin or flute, once the underlying concept is discovered by chance, it is more or less fixed.
Because we are random hapless discoverers rather than masters of creation. Just because we know and can use electromagnetism, doesn’t mean we created it.
In the case of the electric guitar, optimisation was attained when someone fortuitously married a thick solid mahogany body to a humbucker, and a thin slightly hollowed alder body to a singlecoil floating on a sheet of plastic.
The exception of course is synthesized digital sounds. Yet I would hazard a guess that even many of these digital sounds were derived by trial and error, and many were attempts to re-create real physical instruments like strings.
We simply do not have the ability to imagine a sound in our heads, and then produce a physical instrument to attain it.
Therefore on that count, I would never bother with switching out pickups unless they were defective or not sensitive.
For me the guitar is already the guitar. It either sounds good as it is, on a fundamental level, or it doesn’t. The same metal string will vibrate in a rich musical manner on one guitar, and in a sterile thin manner on another. Like Paul always says, no matter what microphone you put on Barbara Streisand, she won’t sound like Paul Rodgers. It sounds like a corny sales line, until you realise it’s an accurate analogy to what’s really going on.
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