I never bought expensive guitars, most expensive one so far is Yamaha Revstar, and I have a few other Epiphone, Squier, Ibanez, ...
I cannot really rate for sound as I am pretty insensitive to that (or maybe because of my poor sound system)
This Epiphone is the most comfortable, most feature rich, however the workmanship is still not that good, I heard Epiphone is doing better but I don't see that, quite a few cosmetic flaws, but not a problem to me.