What percentage of new ukes come with preinstalled pickups?

So I was having this discussion with with my local repair luthier (a real craftsman who's been at it for 30 years and gets instruments sent to him from thousands of miles away). He sees more guitars than any thing else, and was pretty surprised that electronics are so common on new ukes.

So here's a question to the vendors out there (and anybody else ) What percentage of new mid-high end ukulele come with preinstalled pickups?

I'm relatively new to the ukulele world, so this trend seems a little strange to this dyed-in-the-wool folkie who's always preferred microphones over pickups, but when I purchased my new Kamaka on Kauai, the store owner seemed a little surprised that I didn't want a pickup. (Granted, the store has a bit of a rep for high pressure sales, and I'm sure he wanted a bigger sale), but even in the local stores on the mainland, there are LOTS of ukes with pickups these days

I can see the need for some sort of reinforcement for performances because ukes seem to respond better with a light touch (whereas my old Gibson LG2 begs to be abused), but are pickups any better than a mic?

Mahalo

Probably someone with experience selling ukuleles could answer the "what percentage" question. Other than that, from what I've read, some people ("purists") would only mic a uke, because plugging in colors the sound in an un-ukelike manner. Other people ("impurists"), want to be able to move around (and not sit), and maybe have more control of the sound from where they stand. As for me, I'm impure.

I mostly play fiddle: Old-time and Bluegrass, also some fretted instruments. (Ukulele is a relative newcomer and limited to my own living room). In my own stage experience , I prefer mics. A mini clip-on condenser mics like the Audio-Technica Pro-35a works pretty well on the fiddle as long as I'm playing in a band without drums (which would require a LOT of gain before feedback.) Stand-mounted mics are good too, but like you said, don't allow much movement onstage (it took me 30 years to warm up to the idea of the 35a over a mic-on-a-stick ) Obviously feedback will be a limitation with a mic, but as long as there aren't drums, onstage volume doesn't need to be so high there will be feedback thru the monitors.

The piezo pickups I've seen for guitars (as well as the Baggs fiddle system) have been disappointing IMHO. They just don't sound very natural. In fact, they're out-and-out NASTY between 1500 and 5000Hz. OTOH, feedback just ISN'T an issue. On sound gigs when I've run the board, and if an acoustic dance band has a rhythm guitar with a piezo pickup, I tend to put a mic on the guitar in addition to the pickup. Then I weight the channel EQ for the guitar's pickup, cutting the high-mids and treble severely, and conversely the mic will have the bass rolled off nearly all the way. As a result you can get lots of gain without feedback, and it sounds pretty darned natural; the pickup handles the fundamentals up to 1000Hz or so (which is where most of the feedback on a guitar happens) and the mic gets the high end of the spectrum which where all the harmonic complexity lies; a nice, natural sound with better-than-mic-alone feedback rejection. I'm not certain here, but I suppose the Fishman Matrix system does this in an integrated fashion Please correct me if I'm wrong....I understand they have some sort of preamp which incorporates a pickup-vs-mic mixer, but I don't know if there's any EQ weighting per channel.

So, back to ukulele (sorry to hijack the board here ): have modern pickup systems evolved into something more pleasing than what was available 15 years ago, does a uke benefit from a pickup more than, say, a guitar, and , are folks using amplification more for casual gigs and jamming (the reason I started this thread)? I'm just guessing, but to play with any sort of finesse...single string work and fingerpicking..., this newbie is discovering you just cant use as heavy a hand with the uke as you can get away with on a guitar .

PS: on YouTube there are some excellent vids from the 80s of Peter Moon from an instructional VHS (remember those? ) He's playing a nice old 14-fret Martin tenor with a mini condenser duct-taped to the upper bout of the instrument. Duct tape probably isn't recommended for most $2000+ instruments, but I gotta admit, the sound quality of his uke was great.

Another question: Has anybody figured out how to use an AT Pro35 on a uke without duct tape?

Sorry about these newbie-type questions, but I'm hoping some nice discussion might develop.

Aloha