to each their own. I absolutely agree with you on PAFs varying from pup to pup. But if PAF tone is what you're after, the 57/08s don't compare to some of the boo-teek winders out there.
I think we agree that the 57/08s aren't true re-creations of a vintage PAF. They have a "PAF-ish vibe," but they're different.
I'm OK with different; PRS came up with a pickup that works really well
in PRS instruments.
We musicians are a tweaky lot by nature. Everyone's got a different idea about what they want to hear when they play a note or a chord, and considerable sums are spent on the most interesting things. And it's not just we guitar players; concert pianists will spend eons selecting their instrument, and will only let one or two special piano tuners near it, not only to tune the thing (which is done by ear and a tuning fork by the best ones) but to puff up the felts on the hammers a certain manner so that the strings are struck in a particular way.
Orchestral clarinet players will spend their time on eBay looking at tweaky vintage mouthpieces, and buy boxes of used ones if they can find them, to get just the right embouchure and tone happening, which some of them can't seem to find with modern makes.
We talk about vintage re-creations. A while back Gibson's custom shop came out with an SG Special that was a Pete Townshend model.
OK, I have a vintage 1965 SG Special myself, and it's got the original pickups and electronics. It was bought new by my brother when we were kids. I'd lived with that SG for 40 years or so, so I had the nuances of its tone embedded into my brain. And I'm a P-90 fan. I thought, "Wow, I'm going to see how close they came to vintage." Well, the new one wasn't very vintage sounding. It sounded like a modern guitar. It looked like the original, though.
Then again, do my '65 pickups still sound exactly the way they did in '65? I have no idea! I'd need a time machine to know for sure.
What will original 57/08s sound like in 50 years after the magnets age, and the coils, and all that? I know for sure that I won't be around to find out, but my son might just wonder about whether they sound like the ones we played the night he dug the pickups when he visited from LA...