The key to understanding long-neck aficionados is to appreciate our different slant on musicianship. We're finger stylists and soloists. After all you don't need a long neck to strum "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" or "When I'm Cleaning Windows." Long necks afford me with 7 pentatonic shapes and 10 modal shapes. Long necks give me the space I need to construct arpeggio runs up the fret board. I can finger chords (even with my fingers) up to about fret fifteen and that gives a lot of options when playing something like Rhythm Changes. Since my comfort zone is the key of E, my favorite place to play is the 11th fret where that B note sticks out so egregiously. I couldn't do that on a 12-fret instrument. Anyway...I'm not trying to sell anyone on this way of approaching music. I just wanted to explain why some of us like these goofy giraffes.
That makes sense, though I'm mostly a fingerstyle player as well. For that reason, I'm not really fond of 12-fret instruments either, but that's only an issue on sopranos (or smaller), and even then, it's easy enough to find sopranos with 15+ frets.
I do have one soprano with just 12 frets total but with quite a bit more space on the fretboard. I'm a little curious how difficult it would be to for a luthier/tech to add 2 or 3 more frets, to accommodate pieces that range more than an octave.
Anyway, I'm not really playing anything past the 15th fret, which is no problem with 13 frets to the body and doable with 12, though a cutaway helps. In the meantime, I feel like some of those "short-scale" concerts and tenors hit the sweet spot in terms of tone (at least for me). 13 might be my lucky number when it comes to frets to the body.
To be fair, I haven't really given long-neck instruments a chance, so maybe I'll change my mind later. But so far the need hasn't arisen, and the appeal isn't there for me yet.
I think that's pretty impressive that you're hanging out so far up the neck. I'm not even close to mastering just the first 5 frets with linear much less re-entrant tunings.