The Publix chicken tender sub is read off a deli case, not a fryer, and that is the fact that decides everything about it. The tenders are fried in the store and held warm, then built into a long sub roll to order, which means the sandwich is engineered around tenders that have already lost the first minutes of their crispness by the time they meet bread. The whole assembly is arranged to protect what crust survives the warming case: the bread is a soft, yielding sub loaf with little crust of its own, the cheese is laid against it rather than over the tenders, and the cold vegetables go on as a separate cool layer instead of being tossed with the meat. This is a sub that accepts a slightly softened tender as its starting point and is designed around that constraint rather than against it.
The craft is in the build order and the latitude the counter gives the eater. The tenders are split or laid flat the length of the roll so the bite is even from end to end rather than thick in the middle and thin at the ends. A choice of cheese, usually American or provolone, goes on first against the warm tenders so it slumps slightly and tacks the meat to the bread, and the lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickle follow as the acidic, crunchy counter that keeps a soft, salty, breaded filling from reading as one heavy note across a foot of sandwich. The sauce is the lever: a honey mustard, a ranch, a barbecue, or a buffalo, applied to the bread rather than poured over the tenders so the coating is not drowned before the first bite. Pressing the finished sub on a flat-top is a common request, which fuses the cheese, firms the roll, and partly recrisps the tenders, turning the warming-case starting point back toward the fryer.
The variations are mostly a matter of cheese, sauce, and whether the sub is pressed or left cold, all chosen at the counter rather than codified in a kitchen. The same tenders run into a wrap, a chicken finger plate, and a buffalo build that swaps the mild sauce for hot sauce and blue cheese. Those sit inside the broader American fried chicken sandwich, which conducts the same argument about keeping a crust crisp in a closed sandwich through chains and regional styles, and each of those deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.