I've never been a fan of the Tex-Mex pickups, either. I installed them on one of the prettiest Strats I ever had (MIM Agave Blue with tortoice shell and "rosewood" fretboard - just beautiful). While all pups are sensitive to distance from the strings, I found the T-Ms were especially so. Reducing that distance made the pups "hotter" but also bolloxed-up the tone soooo badly that they were almost unusable ("bolloxed-up" being the correct technical term for this phenomenon and is used in place of the most often used, but somewhat crude, expletive).