if most of us are only using the tone pot before the cap kicks in, do different tone pots give different audio aesthetic results?
Good q. Well in a passive tone control, the pot is wired as a simple variable resistance, in series with the cap. That's why just two of the lugs are used. So that means, that if you use, say a 500K audio taper pot, then by winding it back to about 80% (give or take), its resistance is 250K, and from there, it's more or less the same, but compressed into a smaller sweep. OTOH, shifting from 250K to 500K reduces the load on the pickup, and therefore you'll have a tiny amount more treble when the pot is dimed.
and still, when it comes to electronics my brain short-circuits, pretty much straight away and totally ... . Will keep trying but I'm not sure there's any sort of hope.
Ha ha, no worries Michael! It is pretty confusing for sure all this. I'm just lucky because I started early. (Rewound a pickup when I was about 16 IIRC!) The main thing is that a pickup isn't just an entity on its own with its own sound and response. The tone (especially the treble response) of a pickup is a product of the pickup
plus its resistive and capacitive load. Stingrays are a great example of this. Both the classic 70's 2-band and the 90's 3-band preamps have close to a flat response with the controls centred. (Well except for the sub bass roll-off of the 3-band.) But the same pickup, wired directly to either pre, will sound very different in the treble, due to the different loads the two preamps offer. The 2-band as a lower input z (akin to the resistive load of pots), and the 3-band has a huge capacitive load. (Actually has a cap across its input.) So the 2-band stingrays have a treble response that reaches higher into the audio spectrum but it is tamed by that lower impedance. But the 3-band 'rays have more treble on tap, but it peaks early, around 3-4khz typically, then rolls off sharply.