All current methods used to characterize AAV [empty/partial/full] are compared and contrasted along with several case studies highlighting the utility of first-principles, fundamental techniques such as UV-Vis, DLS, and SV-AUC in gene therapy characterization. These methods are useful for deconvoluting interpretation errors caused by ‘Jingle’ fallacies common in gene therapy analytics - e.g., the difference between mass and number weightings when considering constructs such as “%empty” and “%HMW”. While it’s tempting to neglect these methods once more routine, abstracted methods such as PCR are online, abstracted are at higher risk for method induced artifacts.