That is some weird crap, that blog post. I briefly owned a first-year Starfire IV, and it had the minibuckers, of course. You had to fiddle with the pickup heights some to get them to balance, but that's true for every guitar, maybe even more so for hollowbodies and semi-hollowbodies. But both pickups were pretty damn angry and powerful. I've played Newark Street SFIV and CE100 guitars, and while the new pickups do get in the ballpark of the oldies, they're brighter and a little more polite and controlled sounding to my ears. And Steve is right - and got it confirmed too, from Cordoba - that bridge pickup just isn't right.
Is this blog post some lame kind of smoke screen to kill the talk that's been going on here about the guitars that are out there while they fix the next generation? Because I read in there somehow that they're not even planning to fix it.
Another thing : if you're winding a set of pickups, and you're using smaller wire on one pickup, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to use the smaller wire on the bridge pickup so you can get more wire on it for a little more output and midrange?
Strange story. I guess I'm lucky I'm not into humbuckers - not that I thought the N.S. Franz pickups were perfect, but at least they're pretty close for a cheap-ish Korean guitar, and not a strange unbalanced set.