While i don't fully agree with it I would say that there is for sure an "industry standard" for basses. I have been asked many times to "bring a fender P man! i need that! nothing else!", yes I agree there's countless other basses that play nicer and often actually kind of sound better. I guess that Fender set a standard and a sound that people are used to. I do tend to think that people asking to "bring a P!" are just often lazy , because it'll sound good as is, they won't need to do anything to it. On the other hand in the real world , time is money...and i'm not sure some one would get a call back if the engineer spent big extra time eq and adding stuff to it to get it right while it could have been done in 1 second with a Fender.