I suspect Strats just aren't my thing.

It's not just "brightness" I want. You could probably put a low wind single coil in the neck position of a guitar and have it be even brighter than a bridge humbucker, yet it still wouldn't sound great for the stuff that I want to play.

The Dimebucker is pretty bright and still has that metal thump. But if you don't gel with the neck it is game over just sell it.
 
I tried hundreds of strats, built 50, and now I found my recipe. maple neck (thick), ash body, and fretboard, pickup configuration, bridge, will all fall in place. I like Hipshots, I like Floyd Rose, hardtail even. HSH, HSS, SSS... The problem is trying hundreds and discern a pattern of what works and what not. Steering your tone with pickups is very helpful, yes, but the base platform has to be right.
 
have you thought about sanding the neck to give it a thinner profile? I think someone on this forum did it recently.

Not just sanding, but shaping. In most cases its not the thickness, but the shoulders, which make a neck plump and ‚thick‘.
 
Not just sanding, but shaping. In most cases its not the thickness, but the shoulders, which make a neck plump and ‚thick‘.
I like D-shaped necks, personally. But this one isn't all that D-shaped.

The problem I have with this neck is not that it's bad, really. It's just that it was sold as "built for speed", but it's just an almost generic middle-of-the-road neck profile, really, which I guess is "shreddy" by vintage Fender standards.

I could sand it... but that's about as in-depth as routing out the body to make the pickup sit a couple of mm closer to the bridge it self. I feel like it would be more trouble than it's worth for a guitar that doesn't only have this "issue" for me.

I'm moving pickups around. Right now, I've got the Custom on my Les Paul, but I'll move it to the Fender and sell it once I decide which pickup I'm getting for the Les Paul.
 
I've found that I play about as fast on thick necks as thin ones once I've gotten used to them. The only things that always slow me down is bad fretwork or extremely thin necks.
 
I can play the neck. My Les Paul's neck is fatter (but even if I dislike the neck on the Les Paul even more, the Les Paul does sound killer). I just don't overall love the shape of the neck, I think. It's awkward. But I guess what keeps me the most from enjoying it was that I bought it thinking it would be "built for speed", when it's just a random middle-of-the-road neck with jumbo frets where the "baked" Maple is barely baked at all, and my other guitars' necks are more stable even if they're not "baked".

It's not like I hate the Strat, but it's just many things that bother me a little that add up to me not enjoying it. But the neck is like 15%. The other 85% is the tone, honestly.
 
Get a Charvel Super-Strat with a hardtail bridge. That's my current jam, and I'm definitely more of a Les Paul guy normally. With the compound radius, it's a pretty fast neck.
 
It's not like I hate the Strat, but it's just many things that bother me a little that add up to me not enjoying it. But the neck is like 15%. The other 85% is the tone, honestly.
Looks like you just don't like the way it sounds and that's the way it is.
 
I think it just needs to have a neck pickup instead of a bridge pickup. And a tone knob.
 
I think it just needs to have a neck pickup instead of a bridge pickup. And a tone knob.
It also has a neck pickup! It's just black with black polepieces, so it disappears in the black of the pickguard. That's the SDS-1 I was referring to.
 
Controversial opinion, but I think black screws would look better on the neck pickup mount
 
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