I'm going to disagree with you on one of your choices, only because I have dissected their playlist and personalities as the PD of the "other" Classic Hits station in the market:
The playlist is all over the place. They don't even keep the same ratio of the core 80s titles with the secondary 70s and 90s. Of the latter, they choose songs that make me scratch my head in amazement, and of the former, they don't even play the best-testing songs (and those are relatively few compared to the core decade).
They seem to overreact to me at times, putting songs into active rotation right after I played them sparingly on my Forgotten 45s feature. And yet they often overlook more listener-friendly, well-researched titles.
The personalities are all local but don't know when to STFU. Especially their morning guy, who has been deridingly described by many I have talked to as "talking for five minutes without actually saying anything".
KABG is still strong only because they were the heritage Oldies station in the market back in the day, and listener habits are hard to change in the absence of an actual format flip. I do give them credit for the way they transitioned to Classic Hits ... gradual, shifting out of the older songs simultaneously with adding the newer ones. And that approach worked for them and kept their history relevant.
But the rest of it? Suffice it to say that their PD is actually at the Bakersfield AGM cluster ... about 800 miles away.
