The 'Dime tone' to which you refer was always there. You can hear snippets of later things in early clips that are floating around. Dime was always a riff master and from a lead standpoint, he was just a ripping 80's rock player with a pentatonic scale, lots of chromatic licks tossed in, super-smooth legato, and wide, powerful vibrato.
You actually have to listen to his playing to find the commonality, as opposed to his eq. He used the RG100s for a long, long time, as well as the L500L, later XL (never really used the Dimebucker much), and a lot of his riffage was shaped by whatever new toy he found to toss into his rig.
To be continued...