^ when i first read your post I thought you were disagreeing with me, but now I think you're agreeing with me. :lol:
Artificially handicapping the non-CS stuff would seem a bit counter-productive! "Sorry Ricardo, people expect Mexican Fenders to be shiteeee, take them away and $%&# them up a bit more" :lol:
I should think the cost of labour and raw materials pretty much sets a ceiling on how "good" a guitar can be at a particular price point. There shouldn't be a need to intentionally "dumb down". 
Having said that, wood is an idiosyncratic raw material - there's no guarantee an expensive piece of alder will sound better than a cheap piece of alder (or alder-equivalent). There's also no guarantee that two expensive pieces of alder will sound equally good. But that's part of the expertise of a Custom Shop, presumably, so it's the expertise you're paying for, not just "better" materials. Or am I just buying into the hype? :lol:
I think you're buying into the hype. :lol: At first glance it's counter-productive, but with a little analysis it's actually the most sensible thing in the world... from a business point of view, anyway.
Note, I'm not saying CS guitars aren't good (I haven't actually tried any, like you, I don't have the neck on me to try the really expensive stuff which I have no intention of buying :lol: ), and I'm not saying that high-end guitars aren't worth it, but it's human nature- which is easier to do: to make the CS guitars better, or to make the non-CS guitars worse?
I mean, don't the Mexican Standard Fenders have ceramic pickups with bar magnets rather than polepieces (which sound like cr@p)? That sounds suspiciously like artificial handicapping to me. Don't Gibson fit the wrong value pots to their cheaper guitars? Etc. etc.
I'm not saying they set out to make a dog or anything, but there are a bunch of things you can do to, er, "exaggerate" the differences, shall we say.
Floyd Roses- how much cheaper are the really cr@p ones on the cheaper guitars, really? Why are the good floyds only on guitars upwards of £1000, when they could easily put a good Floyd on a £300 guitar and raise the purchase price by, say, £150?
Who would buy the £1500 superstrat if you could get something almost as good for £450? The real purists would still pay the £1500, but for a lot of people the £300 guitar would be good enough- if it had a good floyd so it stayed in tune and sounded good and had a responsive trem. To make matters worse, on a lot of the cheaper guitars the stock bad floyd isn't even a direct swap for a good one- making the upgrade, which would turn a mediocre guitar into a good one, that much harder and more expensive. Is that a coincidence? I guess it might be, but I doubt it.
A lot of people buying the cheaper MIM standard won't try a CS strat to see how much better it is- and those who do may be persuaded to pay the extra for the custom shop one. It's win-win (apart from the consumer).
"I should think the cost of labour and raw materials pretty much sets a ceiling on how "good" a guitar can be at a particular price point. There shouldn't be a need to intentionally "dumb down".
"
True, but the problem is the law of diminishing returns. A £100 guitar might be half as good as a £200 guitar. But a £1000 guitar isn't half as good as a £2000 one. Once it gets past a certain level, it's probably "good enough", and most people, assuming limited funds, would plump for the cheaper option, if the only difference were that extra 2% of tone. But if it's artificially handicapped (say, a floyd that won't stay in tune where the knife edges are made of papier-mache), it's a lot easier to persuade the consumer to part with the money for the more expensive instrument, when there are actual tangible gains to be made with the more expensive instrument.
EDIT: anyway, the basic gist of my post, if you can't be bothered reading the rest, is that Fender could probably make a decent-quality strat or tele, with all the right parts (steel block trem, alnico polepiece pickups etc.) for not much more than a mexican classic costs. But it's not really in their interests to do so, because a lot of people would buy one over a CS.
Oh, and before anyone says, I'm well aware that economies of scale play a part too- what's a worthwhile upgrade when you have one guitar often isn't so worthwhile if you're making 10,000.
