Ok, to address question 1, I've heard of ONE bonus about doing something like this. And it doesn't need to be individual poles, you could do it in as few coils as simply taking the top three and lower three poles and doing two coils. If you were to have the top and lower three poles in different coils, and they were reverse wound, reverse pole, you could essentially get a hum cancelling effect in about as close as you can get to still being a traditional single coil. There's a guy that does this, and I know Jeffry Jones uses some of his pickups in his guitars.

Here's a single coil humbucker that I built. It worked well, just what I was looking for. Here's what it looked like under the cover.