Nothing wrong with following your heart, but you can get a really nice superstratish type guitar for around $600 to $1000. Suhr makes great guitars, and high-end Ibanez are nice, but more modestly priced guitars ghost-built by the big factories in South Korea and Indonesia and sold under various brand names are so good that it’s really hard to justify paying more unless it’s for political or moral reasons. The most important thing for tonal variation is the pickups, and you can get that dimension covered with aftermarket pickups even on a cheapo starter-pack guitar. The most important thing for playability is setup, and tolerances on most mass-produced guitars these days are good enough that pretty much anything you buy can be set up to play like a beast.
Further on pickups, 5-way switches and toggle switches are inexpensive, and any 4-conductor humbuckers can be wired for the same switching options as the AZ2402 with a small amount of internet homework and just a tiny amount of soldering ability. Sweetwater praises the pickups as “balanced sounding” but also gives the bottom line that they’re “moderate output” Alnico V passive humbuckers. Places like Guitarfetish and others sell perfectly decent Alnico V humbuckers in vintage, medium, or hot output levels for about $35 each. If you prefer, “industry standard” aftermarket humbucker models from Seymour Duncan or DiMarzio are about $80 each.
And regarding bridge, the page below says the bridge on the AZ2402 is the T1802, which is a variant of the T1502 with titanium saddles, and the T1502 itself is based on a design similar to the Gotoh 510T.
There are several variants of the Gotoh 510 (see below).
https://g-gotoh.com/international/product-category/tremolo-510-series
The Suhr page below about replacement arms summarizes the 510 variants Suhr uses (a 2-post solid saddle version, a 2-post bent-saddle version, and a 6-screw bent-saddle version). I imagine the bridge used by Suhr that’s closest to the bridge on the Ibanez AZ2402 is the 2-post solid-saddle 510: the Gotoh 510TS-FE1.
https://www.suhr.com/shop/gotoh-510-tremolo-arm/
The Gotoh 510TS-FE1 can be hard to track down as an aftermarket purchase, but one option is the authorized dealer in Japan below that deals internationally:
I’ve seen claims that with a small amount of dremeling to the guitar’s tremolo rout, the 510TS-FE1 can be used as a drop-in replacement to the 2-point bridge on an American Standard Strat. Personally, I’d be tempted to find a cheap guitar I liked with a 6-hole vintage style bridge and drill my own post-holes to install an aftermarket 510 as a flat-mount (the AZ2402 is recessed). DIY routing for a recessed install of the 510 should be do-able, but would be tricker. (Slightly revising from the info below, I’d diy install a Gotoh 510TS-BS1 instead of the 510TS-FE1).
Looking more closely, the shape of the Titanium saddles on the T1802 more closely resemble the brass solid saddles on the Gotoh 510TS-BS1 than the steel solid saddles on the 510TS-FE1. The dimension sheets indicate that the 510TS-BS1 and 510TS-FE1 are dimensionally identical, just with different saddles. Note that in both cases, the “TS” in the name is indicating a steel block; they’re also available in slightly cheaper zinc-block versions indicated with “T” instead of “TS” (the T1802 on the AZ2402 comes with a steel block). Gotoh also makes “six-screw” versions of the 510 bridges, but you’re expressing interest in 2-point.
Short version: nothing wrong with the AZ2402, but you can get way more bang-for-the-buck by buying a decent cheaper guitar, installing a nearly identical Gotoh bridge and hot-rodding the pickups to your liking for less than half the street price of the AZ2402. If you can find a decent price on a used American Standard Strat, you shouldn’t even need to drill new post holes for the 510 (though still a bit of dremeling on the tremolo rout).
