Don't worry zimbloth, I don't feel like you're talking down to me, I get your point.
But I can't say I share the experience of the POD tending to even out differences between guitars. I wish it did! I own a 7321 with an Evo7, an Omen-7 with Blaze Custom and an RG7EXFX2. I have never been able to create a distortion patch that sounded good with more than one guitar at a time. Sure, Cleans work for all of them, but when it comes to distortion, what works on the Omen sounds like crap on the 7321, and so on.
Even the 7321 and the Omen sound so different, it requires extensive adjusting in the settings when changing from one to the other.
Since the day I got my EXFX2, the other guitars rarely get played because I cannot use the setting I recorded these clips with with either of the two guitars. Even worse, I can't seem to adjust the settings to get that sound with them. I really, really wish I could do it, because as it is, the 7321 doesn't get played at all and the Omen-7 is tuned to F standard and has her own patch for when I want to fail at playing Meshuggah.
This is what made me post this thread in the first place: I have never experienced two pickups sounding so similar with the settings I'm using. When I first put the Evo in my 7321, it was another world, same with the Schecter, there was an even bigger difference when I got the EXFX2. In fact, it threw me off completely in the beginning, because all my patches suddenly sounded like shit. It took me a while to figure out settings that make it sound good to me.
Still, even though I have been playing for over 4 years, I have never owned a "real" amp, so it may be the differences there are even more dramatic than with the pod, but I find them dramatic enough as it is.
And again, to everybody: The fact that the blackouts and the 707 are so similar with MY settings does not mean they will be with YOURS. Experiment, post clips, we can only learn from it.