« Great... at what it does »

Seymour Duncan SH8 Invader. 3 ceramic magnets with 12 large hex pole pieces. It by no means a bad pickup, it's just is it what you want? I bought it mainly because ole Papa Hetfield had used one in his Electra V for Kill Em All and I wanted to have my go at somewhat copying that tone. And while it does get that distinct grind it's soo hard to control this pickup. It has so much bass that it's actually hard to keep it from getting muddy/ flubby. If you have multiple guitars with different pickups rest assured that you WILL have to change the settings if you use this pickup, so in my opinion that's a big con for playing live. Constantly having to tweak you amp.
Now there's many people who've used these with success and great tone, but I can't figure out how. In a thin bright guitar such as a Jackson, maple neck thru, ebony board, alder wings... this would be great to thicken it up a bit and give back some low end. But in a solid mahogany guitar it was too hard for me to get it where I wanted. I play faster paced metal where tightness and articulation is key so for me this was definitely not it. If you're playing more classic rock/metal, sludge, doom or styles that don't rely on speed and articulation as much then this might be a great pickup for you. It will make any guitar thicker and beefy but it'll really lose the definition. It’s also very aggressive so along with being muddy it doesn’t have good cleans. It’ll overdrive your amp too easily so getting sparkly cleans is a real challenge. If you don’t mind a somewhat clean/ light crunch tone then this may work for you, but in my experience a true clean tone was very hard to get.
So while it's a great pickup and does everything it's supposed to do, it's just not what I need or want.