>>4179503PRS missed the point so hard by going down the tonewood rabbit hole they ended up making strat and les paul clones as an apology to people that wanted good guitars.
it's a fact of physics that not only does the wood of the electric guitars body barely affect the way the string vibrates, each individual piece of wood regardless of species will have totally different and unpredictable effects in what little it does do. And the neck, not the species used for the neck or the paint used on it (lmao at anyone who believes in tone paint), but the characteristics of that piece of wood from organic variations in the grain to how it was cured to how it was cut does a lot more with regards to sustaining and dead notes, overtones, etc. The nut, fret, and bridge material and to a degree, the design, as well as the scale length and string weight, are the only things outside the signal chain with predictable effects on the vibrations of the string. Outside of that it is purely the pickups, anything that affects their magnetic field, and the electronics down the wire.
Because PRS used garbage bridge designs, an oddball 25" scale length, and awful pickups no matter how much magic wood they threw at their guitars they always sounded nasally and "off" compared to the traditional, more popular variations on the instrument. No one plays a PRS when they're getting popular, yknow. Their ergonomics were also just weird. Definitely oriented towards shredfags but not all the way. So not good at anything.
If this were to relate to cameras, PRS = Sony pushing mirrorless and le magic zeiss lenses. Ultimately they made something that was fundamentally worse and missing some crucial character people expect from cameras while hoping that meme magic would move units. The ergonomics were half street half pro, the colors were bad, the autofocus was bad, the battery life was bad, the MOUNT was bad. Then sony grew up, let the zeiss partnership die, and fixed their shit - sorta.
