Many fine electric guitars are being built these days by American guitar manufacturers.
Some of these manufacturers have built guitars for 50 years or more, and experience has made them all better at what they do. Yet, though many refinements have occurred in the manufacturing process, it's amazing how little real change has affected the guitar's electronics.
There's a simple way to build a better on-board tone control. And it doesn't have to involve active electronics.
All you need is a couple of transformers.
If you're looking for a wide-range tone control, the best solution is to use inductors. Trouble is, its hard to match the impedances of inductors to the high impedance devices we use for guitar pickups.
Simply put, it's hard to find an inductor big enough. Theoretically, the impedance of an inductor varies inversely with frequency. At the guitar's very low frequencies, of course, most inductors have insignificant values of impedance.
It's a simple scenario, but the way to change this is to use impedance transformers.
Of course, you'll still need to use humongous inductors. They're hard to find, and they cost a bunch, but you can get them. I bought a 7 henry inductor a few years ago, in a surplus shop, for less than 5 dollars, and I bought a couple of small-signal transformers from Radio Shack for another 3 dollars. The transformers were rated 1k ohm to 8 ohms (or 125 to 1), so the transformers were just about right for transforming impedance from 500k to 4k, to match fairly closely the 7 henry inductor's impedance levels, at the low end of the range of the guitar's pitch (it's low E note being somewhere around 100Hz) .
You get two of these inductors, wire them up with a couple of capacitors in a wien-bridge configuration (start with .33 uFd), and you bridge them with a 10K potentiometer, then you start tweaking...
Want me to build you one? Hire me.
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