That's a good reading strategy! :D I'm probably going to stick with authors whose previous works I've enjoyed and read the other fics based on recommendations (so I'm depending on lovely people like you do all the work and tell me what's worth reading! ;)).

because there are still qualities we attribute to jared, jensen, chad, misha, etc - and replacing one with another wouldn't read as "true", y'know what i mean?

Mm, true enough. I've thought the whole search+replace thing over since I posted about it yesterday, and since I've never tried the method myself, I can't actually say whether it would work for me. I suspect that switching names between familiar characters wouldn't work for me (e.g. switching a Dean/Cas fic into a Dean/Sam fic -- or even Dean/Cas into J2 because I would know that the fic started out as Dean/Cas and I would recognize certain interactions/behaviours/etc as very Dean/Cas-like -- it might be a different case if someone else sent me the fic with the names already switched and I thought that the fic was actually J2...), but I predict that swapping the names from an original fic with J&J wouldn't phase me much.