(c) 2016 Don Baker dba android originals LC
Let me put this in Bold: With humbucking pairs, you can set a guitar up to shift from warm to bright without ever knowing which pairs are used.
Other guitars have come onto the market with a huge number of switch choices, and no road map from bright to dark, no warning signs for hum ahead. For example, the Fender Marauder ™, with 81 switch choices, of which about 7 were unique and humbucking. 60 choices of the 81 had hum. And the Music-Man Game Changer (also here). The switching diagram for the Game Changer ™, if I read it correctly, claims 35 different combinations with only two humbuckers, a single-coil pickup and an optional piezo pickup. Both the Marauder and the Game Changer required the guitarist to figure out and remember where the best outputs lay among the many choices. According to some reports, not many sold.
With humbucking pairs, the Marauder with four equally-spaced pickups could have had 12 different humbucking outputs, including in-phase and contra-phase, serial and parallel. With humbucking pairs, the Game Changer could have had 16 different humbucking outputs. Like the Paul Reed Smith 513(tm), it might have had 20 if the pickups were more evenly spaced, but the close coils in the two humbuckers cut down on choices with distinct tones.
So the difference between a Marauder or a Game Changer and a guitar properly set up with humbucking pairs is like comparing a diesel truck with 3 or 4 shift levers and 35 to 81 gears, not all of which work well, or in a progressive order, to a car with an automatic transmission and a shift lever going through 12 to 20 progressive gears.
Sorry, guys; that’s just the way the math works out. You can verify it for yourselves from the Humbucking Pair Tutorials. Granted, the theory still needs to be tested to identify the right progression of HB pairs from warm to bright, and the optimal matched single-coil pickup poles, order and spacing for any particular application. But that’s relatively straightforward and doable.