I recently put a set of Burners, Light gauge, on my 1993 BMT. It totally came to life. The bass sounds better than it did when I purchased it. I started noticing the better tone output about 5 years ago. I am convinced, as it ages - the tone is getting better.
I read that neck thru basses have a stronger fundamentally lows than bolt-on necks. So a did some tests between my Smith neck-thru basses vs. the bolt-on necks - guess what - it is true. The Smith had a much stronger low end response and compared to the others.
So if you plug your neck-thru smith in amp that has EQ settings for a bolt-on bass - the Smith could sound muddy.
Additionally if you plug a bolt on bass in an amp with EQ settings for a neck-thru Smith - the bolt-on "most likely" will have very little to no low end response.
These are my observations...
And I could be wrong