And yet, everything you mention as a positive for Paizo could easily also be a negative (with the exception of the number of APs). The tightly-themed and constructed APs are also very limited in scope, lead-by-the-nose, setting-bound, and change-averse. If your goal is to sit down tomorrow and read box-text (skipping half of the printed backstory because the players will never know it) until someone puts minis on the board for a fight, then, Pathfinder's APs (with some notable exceptions, mind you) are what you want. If you are looking for sandbox, adaptable, setting-neutral, role-play heavy, easily converted material... then not so much in my experience.
And hand-waving the lighter rules is just that (hand-waving). The whole reason that APs are so important for a Pathfinder GM is the absolute mind-numbing effort required to create large numbers of encounters. The rules make that level of AP necessary. Never once in Pathfinder have I seen a GM "wing-it" for an entire session. That was SOP in 1e and 2e AD&D (at every table I every played and/or ran)!
You don't need as tight of an AP structure when the rules allow quick and easy encounter design. And that's a big selling point for both player and DM.
Once 5e has a little more time, the core books, and a few more APs under its belt... we'll see...
You seem to have missed my point, I'm afraid.
I'm not arguing for Paizo, or their APs. Your whole "could be construed as negatives" deal doesn't actually engage with what I'm saying at all. I'll simplify it for you:
No-one who buys Paizo APs is likely to regard those things as bad points.
No-one who wants a sandbox, buys an AP.*
So what you're saying is there irrelevant.
As for the heavy rules leading to the APs, well, I agree 100% that the rules-heavy nature of 3.XE lead directly to the popularity of APs**. However, I would strongly argue that it is not why they remain popular. Rather, peculiar circumstances lead to a moderately common kind of product becoming a
very common kind, and created a large audience for that product. That audience is not going away, because otherwise, they'd already have gone to the multitude of other RPGs which already offer that lighter DM load (OSR games, 4E, most RPGs).
As for your claim of "winging it" being "sop" in 1/2E, well, obviously that can't be true generally (true for your groups, sure), because Dungeon was popular, as were adventure modules, including ones equivalent to APs (they were usually boxed sets which were much more expensive and unfriendly than APs, though). 1/2E were much easier to wing it in, but they weren't trivial to do so, and a lot of DMs liked pre-written adventures.
So that market now exists and does not hate APs. I know a number of DMs who have kids and a lot of work, and don't feel they have time to write adventures to the standard that they would like, and those guys, they buy APs, and would buy APs for 5E, but would not write adventures for it - they just don't have time for creating maps and dungeons and elaborate plots and NPC backstories (or feel they don't, it's irrelevant as to whether they actually don't).
* = Unless they have literally no idea what they are buying.
** = I know this because I used to like APs, but 4E doesn't have remotely the same overhead as 3.XE/PF, so I found I didn't need them and started writing my own adventures again.
