Trust me man i'm a big blues fan. I tend to like it more when you jazz it up a bit tho. Instead of just the 1 4 5, throwing in some kind of 6 2 5 1 somewhere, not that its not done in traditional blues, that's what the turnaround is in blues, but i mean playing it harmonically, not only in the form of turnaround riffs.
Thing is, blues and jazz are closely related. Try and find a great jazz musician who has never played some kind of blues form, and, well, you'll have to look pretty damn hard. In my jazz camp we're playing a coltrane tune tommorow, but its really a 12 bar, but with a few passing chords, and the soloing isn't only from the blues scale (I like to use a lot of dorian licks for this one, Mr. P.C.)
The reason i didn't talk about blues is because its harder to talk about blues in absolutes, and thus harder to make arguments with it. You and I can dig it, but we can never objectively say, "that guy plays with more feeling than that guy," its not a concrete thing. Dont get me wrong tho, I think SRV was great at what he did, and BB King is too. I do, however, tend to get tired of listening to too much straight 12 bar stuff, cause face it, it can get repetetitve. That's why its more intersting with chord substitutions, and soloing instruments other than the guitar, as well as having a piano to help out the guitar with comping.