My guitar history started in the latter half of the seventies, first with a classical which soon gave way to a Hagström Viking which in turns was swapped to an Ibanez FG100. That was the era of the 50's Rock'n'Roll/Rockabilly revival which means my idols played more or less clean sounds with some sort of echo-oh-oh-oh. At that time I didn't know anything about the differences of pickups, to me they were just things that picked the sound to the amp, in my case at bedroom volume levels with the parents sleeping in the same room - not literally though.
Anyhow, a slightly overdriven sound is what I've learned to prefer. I've never learned to play using distortion, the few attempts have sounded horrible even in my own ears. When I once tried a tube screamer at a shop it almost made me sh*t my pants, it literally screamed like a banshee making me embarrased and ashamed to produce such a sound in public.
Lately I've seen videos where they explain how to use such devices for just fattening the clean(ish) sound but since moderately using the gain control seems to give me the sound I like I haven't bought anything of that ilk. Were I in a band things might be different.
So my first guitars were equipped with humbuckers but my own builds all have single coils, don't actually know why as I've heard nice crisp humbuckers on some videos. Then again, isn't a dual single coil in both pickups mode basically a widespread humbucker?