For questions of coil geometry, stock Dano lipsticks's with their longer housing might sound a bit brighter than the Duncan lipsticks in one of my Strats, but there's not a big difference to my ears... I've no experience with Dano sized Duncan lipsticks but they shouldn't be that different either, logically.
Personally, I've mounted lipsticks because I wanted the sound of lipsticks with their weak DCR, low inductance and boatloads of Eddy currents: that's the way to SRV's tone in "Tin Pan Alley"...
Not sure there's much room for improvement in such a pickup design: the cylindrical housing can host a coil with a magnet inside it but keeps them away from the strings. And as I said, it contributes to high Foucault currents, flattening the resonant peak... A plastic housing would solve this issue but would still keep the guts of the pickup far from the strings...
If regular lipsticks are too weak and bright, it's possible to mount them with 1M pots (and/or at least a no-load tone pot, like the one in my Strat with lipsticks), THEN to correct their brightness with a capacitor from hot to ground... it will shift down the resonant frequency while the higher resistance pots will make the resonant peak more pointy, like with a normal Strat pickup.
Knowing that lipsticks have an inductance around 1,3H (half the value of a SSL1), a 330pF cap added in parallel should drag their resonance in the SSL1 territory. For warmer mid-centric tones, 1nF to 3,3nF would be something to try (1nF being already able to shift down the resonant frequency in the SSL5 range)...
Lipsticks also work well in series, IME.
FWIW. HTH.
