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Like guns, musical instruments today are fantastic quality for the price. A new $300 Squier is better than a MIA Fender equivalent from the 90s, in my opinion. Manufacturers with less of a "lifestyle" position are even better.
CNC machining has been a real game changer.
Yes and no. Any part that can be CnC'd can be essentially perfect provided it uses quality materials (which is very much not the norm when you get to 90% of MIC / MII / MIK guitars with eg. a Floyd Rose bridge). There's still a lot of hands on work required and much of this is crucial for really good playability. It doesn't matter if the neck itself has been built to exacting tolerances if the frets are uneven and your local guy charges $200 or more to fix that. And it's not that those far east OEM builders can't build a guitar with high quality manual work but when they're still essentially competing on price, the brands are very tempted to choose the cheaper package which means less hands on time which in turn means lower quality. I expect we'll see high end MIC / MIK brands emerge that are going to compete on name recognition and quality instead of low price.
Of course if the goal is just to surpass Gibson quality and consistency, well, any Squier probably already does that at a tenth or less of the price.
As a rule most guitarists are braindead idiots so you very rarely see them understand what quality control even means and how it's completely pointless to make statements about quality of some brand / line based on single specimens. Yes, that particular $300 guitar might play better than that particular $3000 guitar (with often different specs even!) but to say anything authoritative you'd need to compare dozens of specimens of identically specced guitars which unfortunately nobody ever does. Then you get idiotic statements like "Well I haven't played a cheap guitar that feels the same as my [insert specs here] Gibson (a brand known for extreme variance) so they can't be any good" as well as "I like my $400 Squier better than a $3000 Stratocaster so it never makes sense to pay more than $500 for a guitar" (nevermind that there are smaller brands whose entire focus is on the highest build quality instead of vintage accuracy).
I feel like you may have far higher standards than me for instrument quality.
In 1995 I was dealing with bad frets and a warped neck. Now I'm just dealing with bad frets on a cheaper tool. To me, that's huge progress.
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