There's also some placebo effect. You know it's an expensive CS bass, so your brain processes incoming information in a (positively) biased way. This is a very well-established fact in consumer psychology.
I do agree with you wholeheartedly. I'm a chef by profession, and have bartended for over 25 years in between cooking gigs to keep my sanity (didn't work). One of the biggest challenges is to be as objective as possible when selecting ingredients, recipe testing, etc. It also works in our favour as good presentation of a dish or a cocktail increases the customer's enjoyment of same massively. I now market and sell a premium quality packaged smoothie that is sold in 20 countries, and the exceptionally well-designed packaging and where we place it in the marketplace has helped us enormously- but without a product that reflects the quality of the packaging we wouldn't last very long or experience the rapid growth we do, and we would have to spend so much more than we now on advertising to become known, as word-of-mouth advertising would be slim to non-existent.
On the other hand, if you are aware of the effect you can train yourself to mitigate it by doing blind tastings, and learning to trust your first impressions if they are based on enough experience. I'm skeptical of any product being better than another based on it's price, brand, reputation or who is hawking it, so I'm extra critical when trying new things.
I'm not of the opinion that every CS bass is better sounding than every 'lesser' Fender product, and I've played a lot of cheaper ones that sound great. I say play each bass and judge it on its merits; if you find a trend emerges it can be helpful in narrowing your search, but don't put overmuch faith in these prejudices.
This is why I am as happy playing my Tokai Hard Punchers as my CS Jazz, because they are all simply great sounding and playing basses.
That Custom Classic linked from the classifieds is a beauty- this range of updated classic Fender designs is unfairly overlooked in the category of Super-Js, for example. Most people don't even know the range exists, and judging from the lack of threads and comments about them, i doubt many have even tried one. I know that most Fender dealers that carry only a few CS basses will stick with the TM models exclusively, further reducing their visibility.
