A: Gibson thought they were making solidbody jazz guitars, all the way up until crazed drug addicts began selling millions of records by doing horrible things to them.
B: Leo Fender had three primary design considerations in mind -
1) His guitars could be made on then-currently available furniture-making machinery, with no expensive up-tooling;
2) They could be assembled by low-paid, semi-skilled labor;
3) They were to be made out of whatever reasonable-grade stuff was available on the market - cheap wood, commercial-grade electronics, common auto paint, etc. No expense whatsoever was wasted on the actual merchandise itself.
Jimi Hendrix greatly preferred new, post-CBS Strats; Carlos Santana recorded "Black Magic Woman on a nineteen-SIXTY-eight Les Paul reissue; Mark Knopfler recorded "The Sultans of Swing" with a no-name $100 "oriental" Strat copy; when Gibson went to copy Slash's favorite Les Paul for his signature model, it turned out to be a fake, so they copied the copy cause it was a better guitar than a Les Paul.
"The Very Best Sound Quality, From the Very Best Guitarists Who Practiced the Very Hardest at Sounding Good?" Oops, wrong forum.... :toothy11:
I once tried to explain to someone why signature model-receiving tone fiends like Steve Vai, Steve Morse, Eric Johnson and Jeff Beck usually end up playing the very first prototype of their sig model for years at a time before switching around to new ones - it was hopeless.