I'll tell you right now that getting a nut cut by someone who knows what they're doing is the most important step to getting a standard trem to stay in tune. the thing that started all this was my getting the trem to stay in tune pretty well on my squier strat. I had just dowelled and redrilled for an american bridge and did a really carful job of getting the screws in a straight line. The bummer is that a strat trem won't go down as far as the floyd rose. Like it's not even close. I could get the low E string to go EVH low in pitch, but not spaghetti strings. Then it would kind of be in tune. The floyd allows you to do anything in the world that would normally get a strat out of tune (like run over it with a car - different story) and it stays in tune. STAYS in tune. The bummer is that it can take you all afternoon to get it in tune in the first place.
The other bummer about the floater is that is sucks up all the force I apply to bend strings. Like I used to be able to bend the pitch of the G string/2nd fret to a B (one whole step) pretty easily. Enough so that I did it all the time. When i was going headbanger last night, I couldn't push the string far enough to get the pitch up. I was pushing into the D and A strings, but the pitch was still flat. The bridge was giving so much that I think it'd be impossible to bend that particular note.
I always play with .010s and I was thinking that I want to put .009 or .008 on this one and set it up for that. The action of the trem with three springs is just a little heavy, I think. I mean, I can physically move it, but if I have to deal with this instability and whatnot, i want to be able to fly on this fretboard.