"Why they just couldn't leave it alone is beyond me."
I'm trying to put some sense to it. I have a hunch they wanted to achieve something with it. Making a proper angle with a neck-thru is more tricky than leaving it straight/flat. To make lower action more easily achievable even for someone who is not quite so experienced in setting up a bass? Did they perhaps reduce the backward angle of the TBird headstock in the process to make it less break-prone?
I know, I know, you guys are like the Supreme Court,
mostly
Originalists (except when it doesn't match the own agenda of course), but what if the deviation from the original is an improvement? It does happen, you know.
I'm crawling back under my rock. But in almost 30 years of playing TBirds it has never bothered me whether the neck joint (with a neck-thru it's not really a "joint") has an angle as long as the bass sounds good and can be set up well.
Or are these new TBirds set neck rather than neck-thru? If that's the case, why the excitement at all, because in my book they are then not real TBirds anyway.
It's no matter what you do, but no messin' with the neck-thru!Now gang up on me, I'll be your martyr!