LostTheTone

I think this really breaks down into two distinct questions - 1) Would a single vintage guitar be a better financial investment than a wall of regular guitars? and 2) Would a single vintage guitar be better for someone who plays a lot of guitar?. On the first one, it is certainly possible that a single vintage guitar could end up making better financial sense. There are plenty of high end collectables which do retain their value over time, or even accumulate value, depending on how collectable they are. Stradivarius violins are an obvious parallel, but also classic cars and rare firearms and so on all have similar profiles. If something is "a classic" when you buy it, it will probably still be if/when you sell it. On the second one though, absolutely not. The only way that a vintage guitar retains its value is, basically, by never leaving its case. It may have perfect tone, it may have the most beautiful finish, it may have been personally licked by Jimmy Page, but if you bonk the headstock against a wall you can almost hear your wallet screaming in pain. No matter how careful you are, you are still putting more mileage on the clock. And that's the real problem - These things cost so much that you (or me anyway) can't justify spending that kind of money unless you know you will get it back later. But the only way to make sure you keep the value is to not play it. If you are thinking to sell a bunch of collectable guitars and get one uber-collectable guitar, while also having your daily beater guitars to actually play - Yeah, that could make sense. But liquidating everything just to have one uber-collectable guitar? Nah, you'll end up buying more guitars because you don't want to play the one really expensive one.

A couple of years back I rebuilt a very beaten up strat to just have a single volume control and a single humbucker, because I wanted a clean and smooth look, and the one thing I really regret is NOT having any way to trim the tone. The first time I played it the treble was just awful, way beyond needing to have it's own amp settings. Being fizzy and lairy is about the worst thing that an overdriven guitar can be. I did put a treble bleed in, which worked ok, but it still never quite sounded right. Eventually I just pulled the pickup out and put it in a guitar that I actually wanted to play (it was an SD Distortion, so I didn't want to just abandon it) and ran it through the regular 500k tone and volume, and now it plays great. It never even occurred to me to have an internal trim pot, but that really is the perfect solution. You don't need a huge amount of tweaking room, but you do need something to gently massage the top end and find a good base tone to work with before you start feeding it into any other hardware. I bet you can even find a spot on most builds to set the trim pot into the cavity and have an inconspicuous hole for a screw driver so you can adjust it from the outside.