Re: Seymour Duncan be trollin hard
I don't doubt that there are real benefits. I'm curious who will want them, though? They don't reproduce classic materials, so the retro market wont want them. If they were aimed at people wanting broader frequency response from magnetic pickups (piezo has a few undesirable behaviors, though most of those are worked around by expensive modern preamps), I'd think they'd more be looking at soundhole pickup designs, or using different polepiece designs like Parallel Axis or blades.
I've been involved in discussions about the tradeoffs for silver pickup windings, general conclusion was they'd probably be too bright (though I still thought there might be some good uses for it). Someone's already brought up oxygen free copper in this thread, but the conclusion before was that OFC would get some of the benefits a lot cheaper.
Different alloys for polepieces make a LOT of sense to mess with, and should be cheaper to experiment with, especially if ordered in bulk.
As a random aside, I'd love to see more experimentation with different insulators. Altering capacitance of the coil is a great way to tune brightness and midrange response.