Just to clear it up, unfortunately, I'm not buying that one, not yet - that's why I used quotation marks ("shopping") but that wasn't clear either - correct word would have been browsing I guess. Darn frenchie!
FWIW, I never liked SGs until recently - it was all strats and LPs for me. The way they looked and felt totally put me off. And then after getting back to LPs for a while, I started wishing for something that'd have elements of both the strat and the LP. I knew I wanted:
Tune-o-matic type of bridge
Knobs and switch out of the way
A pair of humbuckers
Better higher frets access than the LP
Set neck
And I'm a man of pretty traditional tastes, so I tend to want to stick to classic models, like Gibson's and Fender's. At that point, I was more likely to go with Gibson than anything else, anyway.
I tried to find one SG I'd feel comfortable playing, but it wasn't until I tried a Epiphone SG with a fatter neck that it somehow clicked. That neck somehow made up for the overall thinness of the guitar. And then I saw that the 2013 SGJ had pretty much everything I wanted - including a fatter neck -
and allowed me to finally put my hands on an actual Gibson, not an Epiphone. Ok, it's an entry level Gibson, but it's
mine.
When I ordered it, my wife asked me if I really thought I could be happy with it, being that she knew how I dug LPs. I still didn't like SGs all that much but I was warming up.
It wasn't long until I found myself wishing that I'd switched to SGs decades ago. And the guitar started to look better and better as that happened.
I still think the LPs are the best looking solid body ever, but I've developed a strong taste for the SGs.