Huh, weird .... those appear to be functional and well-made.
that's because you're looking at it the way an audience looks at an instrument on stage.
My weekend car has a paint job that gets glowing compliments when I'm pointing at it from 40' away but cleaning & waxing it is taxing on the soul. Orangpeel city. I really want to have a good shop take it down to the metal and do a proper block sanded paint job.
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I'm really not sure how much I empathise with OP.
It's kinda tough for me to stomach $2k for something that's not at least
as good cosmetically as their own <$900 imports. But, I've watched the value of the dollar drop and drop and drop since graduating high school over two decades ago. A backwards take is "everything costs four times more than it did around Y2K for the same quality or it costs the same for a quarter of the quality".
$2k looks like a lot of money through old eyes, but as I'm struggling with the prices of
everything else, I am finding it easier to see USA 7enders as $500 guitars that we're stuck buying with crappy cut-value money. I'm stuck paying "$3.50-5.00" for a gallon of milk that in my eyes should still cost $0.95.
Their non-CS instruments will always be "$500-800 guitars" through my old millennial eyes and every couple of years they have to use a larger money-number to represent the same actual value.
If we're lucky, in another ten years whatever their stupidly named new version of the old "American Standard Series" will be having to take 3,000 US shrinkybucks to purchase and the cheapest Squier will be "$549.99". If we're less lucky it'll be $4k & $899.99 and they'll be building factories in Africa to produce $300-700 guitars that may get Squier branding or a new budget brand below Squier.
I worked at a 7εndεπ dealer for a half decade and I saw a lot of flawless Jazz guard-to-plate matches on Squiers and a lot of US 7εndεπs with glaringly obvious mismatched plates. I don't know how anyone in management lasts there more than three years, or
if they do.
God bless them. By doing QA from 40' away, they're making it so that other guitar entrepreneurs & the laborers whom they hire can have a big enough slice of the pie to survive and sometimes even thrive.
In my real world experience, 7εndεπ made a lot of Ibanez sales for me without me having to say a single thing to the customers. Martin did too, lol!
I feel bad for FMIC's underpaid-for-CA workers. They are the ones who're hurt by management not seeing this stuff as both the industrial tools that they primarily are, and the jewelry that they have to be to better answer the customer's question "why
should I buy an MIA 7εndεπ instead of literally anything else?"
