Re: Your opinion on Epiphone guitars
Tried to give an Epi LP an honest chance a few years ago in a store, and it just felt cheap from end to end. Minor cosmetic issues like rough cavities no one will ever see and outer body edges I'll never touch mean nothing to me. The body was entirely too light to have "Les Paul" on the headstock, and the neck felt hollow. My Agile was way more substantial.
I know Gibson let Epiphone keep a few of their original designs and they do them at a high level, but the LP, V, Explorer, and SG shapes are Gibson's, and an Epiphone version is still a cheap knockoff IMO.
Granted, I only play Jacksons, and most of the ones I have now are imports, but those are imports that do not have a USA counterpart - Warriors with maple boards and black fins, a Morton (which never had a USA counterpart except CS and limited run CS models), and the NASL Archtop Superlight Soloist that was only available in Japan, and a neckthrough Floyded KV that has a round neck instead of that thin flat-back thing on the KV2, and an artist signature prototype that never made it to production.
The only import I have that has (or did) a USA counterpart is the '93 Collen Archtop Pro. However, those are no longer made (unlike USA Les Pauls) except as CS limited runs, and when a 1990-93 USA Collen Archtop does come up for sale, it gets away before I can move on it.
But I do have a CS USA SLS, a CS 7-string Warrior, my CS WarAngel, a KV2T (which seriously needs a Floyd), a JZB2 bass (USA body and neck, import hardware and pickups) and a Jazz'R. I don't kid myself about my imports - they're all nice, but USA versions would be so much better, they're simply not available in a production model. Epiphones do have affordable USA counterparts.