It's only natural that your degree of self consciousness is going to be at it's greatest and most irrational when you're on stage in front of many people you've never met personally and have not had a chance to impress with your personality alone, quite the opposite of when you're on your couch at home, playing for nobody who doesn't already know you very well. I can understand the desire to have a impressive appointments on stage, a clean outfit, "purposefully" groomed hair, etc. As others have pointed out, the "pros" use MIA premium line guitars, and part of you might worry that if you are seen on stage with Epiphone on the headstock instead of Gibson, someone in the crowd might think you're a dilettante who has no business being on stage, and it's precisely because of that irrationality that I'm passionate about defending said Epiphones and imports.
When you're thinking in these terms, there's a problem, because even a cheap guitar satisfies the requirement of giving you six string spanned across a piece of wood with an ample supply of working frets beneath those strings, the guitar should never ever be the weak link if it has no specific identifiable defect that can be repaired by yourself or a luthier.
Pretty much the only problem I've come across where an import couldn't be made to play perfectly is/was a special case, neck twist on those single piece Tele necks. My MIA Tele is a rosewood fingerboard two piece, so I'm not sure how the MIA Tele single piece compares in terms of neck twist, but it's a common issue from what I understand since a single piece neck as less lateral stability than two or more piece necks. Otherwise, a home done fret job and nut filing and neck adjustment will make an import as premise where it counts as any MIA, assuming the import wasn't set up well enough to begin with, because a big difference in playability is simply how much attention was paid to the setup of the guitar, and not due to any inherent quality of a domestic versus an import which can't be changed or remedied in a few hours or less.
