Hey Richard,
I'll probably go for the long scale bass since the last bass I had, ( Gibson Victory ), was a long scale, and I had no problems playing it. It was just a very bright sounding bass that didn't seem to have enough bottom end. and it was rather heavy, (solid maple body and neck).
So, the active circuitry all depends on the shielding in the guitar itself from any interference it might pick up from surrounding electronics.
There have been a lot of bass players over the years who have inspired me to pick up the instrument and learn it better, among the them are Tony Levin, Stu Hamm, Randy Coven, Billy Sheehan, Dave Hope, T.M. Stevens, duG pinnick, and Micheal Anthony to name a few.
There are a lot of basses on Evil Bay in various price ranges, and while I haven't compared MM SUBS to Stingrays, I did compare the Sterling JP50 to the MM JPX, and found there is quite a difference in tone. The playability of both were very good, but the Sterling doesn't give you the electronics that you get with the MM, and the Sterling was darker sounding. I'm sure I would notice something similar with the bass guitars.
Do you have that preset chart in .pdf format? I don't have MS Office on my laptop. I might be able to open that with one of my older laptops, because I have older versions of Office, but they don't work in Windows 8.1.
While John Suhr makes some fine instruments, I've never been a fan. As for Alembic, I played a few back in the day. Like Rickenbacker basses, they just don't feel right in my hands, so I probably won't be looking at any of those. A friend of mine has a John Entwistle Explorer model he's been trying to sell me, but I just don't like the feel of it.
Harley