Owning and working around vintage instruments all day every day has a tendency to make you a bit snobby about certain guitars - gibsons,gretsches,old fenders etcc.. all had a certain amount of variance and there were always good and bad ones in all of them.
On the gibson side of things, ive owned several really great ones over the years and played/worked on a LOT of bad ones.When you play enough of them, you start to see patterns with them where if the guitar is a good one, it immediately feels "old". it's hard to describe but once you see it, you kind of get it and can damn near pick out the good ones by sight.

i have a soft spot for sg's but because they vary so wildly dude to their construction, it's hard to find a great one.I owned a particularly fantastic special from the mid 90's that,to this day, is one of the best sg's ive ever played and i've been having the sg/jcm800 itch a lot here lately so i started trying to narrow down the years and models that had what i was looking for ( a one piece body and a huge neck seem to yield more winners in the tone/playability department) and settled on a standard or special made between 93 and 2002. from everything i've read and seen firsthand, these years had the biggest necks on the standards and specials that gibson ever put on them, and if you cherrypick enough of them, you can find guitars outside of the custom shop with one piece bodies.
This guitar was the fruit of that search - it's a mid 2000 (according to the serial and control panel) has enormous neck that is just shy of a 56/57 les paul neck and the body is one big piece of mahogany. the guitar is just stupid good - it's light, resonant,sustains for days and has a great mid range kerang thing that is just addictive to play. Whatever Gibson was doing back then was right - all the guitars i've played from that time period ranged from really good to jaw droppingly amazing.