I've been doing a lot of pickup stuff lately. When I started it all my initial mental position was, "It's magnets, plastic, and wire - how hard could it be?" That simple curiosity has served me well in life but the problem is the discovery of just how wrong I am every time I say it costs me a LOT of time. Sometimes it makes me money. Sometimes it makes me smarter. Sometimes, well, sometimes I'd have been better off spending that time elsewhere.
I have a pile of articles brewing about pickups but suffice to say that after hundreds of hours of obsessing about minutia, digging into theory and spending money on even more test equipment (seriously, who needs a gaussmeter?) I'm here to tell you that though it's pretty simple to take some magnets, plastic, and wire and make your own pickup, there are very valid reasons why some sound better than others.
I believe that it's human nature to want things to be simple (unless you work in IT, apparently) and people (myself included) want to believe that pickups are simple. They are not. There are a lot of complex interactions at work that can be hard to understand unless you're into electronics and physics which is why we revert to saying things like "HB-1s sound chimey" and "Fender HB-1s sound muddy". At the level of communicating about sound, those terms work. What gets me into trouble, like the Curtis Novak says in the article, is that I need to know why. When he was a kid he took apart drills. For me, it was telephones.
I also don't sleep much which is why I'm posting at 4:30am. Sheesh. I'm going back to bed.