I still play a Mexican Fat Strat (HSS) I got used in 2003, and I still feel like it’s a lovely instrument and I don’t feel held back by it at all or anything like that—it’s one of the objects I keep closest to me day-to-day, it’s within inches of my left hand right now. I used to have a Japanese Fat Strat that my uncle gave me which had a “Floyd Rose” locking tremelo, but that guitar was stolen out of my trunk when someone smashed my car window in NYC at like age 19 
…I miss it because I use the floating tremelo constantly for vibrato and with a normal tremelo it drives the guitar out of tune fairly quickly, but it would take like 10x longer to happen with that locking tremelo. Also it had a pretty sunburst pattern, whereas the Mexican Fat Strat I have is just black with a white pickguard (which I still like the style of, the sunburst was just nice…by now the Mexican one has fading stickers of birds and flowers on it and the black varnish is chipped off in several places from years of wear so it does have its own nice atmosphere 
).
I like Strats in general because of their glassy tone (surely they still have that today…?), and Fat Strats in particular because of the versatility they gain from the humbucker bridge pickup. I actually really like the sound of the middle single coil and bridge humbucker together; I think it’s in a neat middle ground between the rough coolness of the single coil and the quackey brightness of the humbucker. If I was given a have-a-guitar wish by a guitar fairy, I might get an HSS from G&L, because of their fancy pickup selector that lets you split the humbucker into its individual single coils and select non-adjacent pickups and things. I’m curious to know what that’s actually like to have around day-to-day. I will admit though that I often just leave my guitar on the same pickup setting for days though and don’t think about it really…so much of the sound of any guitar just comes from what you do with the strings I feel like ultimately. The knob I think I fiddle with the most is probably the spring reverb on my amp, because I feel like that affects the “mood” of my playing a lot.