Gibson has gone waaaaay downhill over the past 15 years or so. My '85 epiphone shits tonally on any Gibson you don't spend over $4k on. Martin is doing the same thing, hands down best acoustic guitars in the world if you wanna spend $6k+ on them up to ~200k. But there are brands like maton and Cole Clark in au that make acoustics that sound better than 99% of the $1-5k martin and lower end Taylor's.

It seems your issue with guitar center is more that they have such good deals that you buy stuff you don't need/want(which is pretty standard I think for musicians in music stores). I go into guitar center all the time and don't buy anything. I'll go in to test new synths or guitars that come out and if I want to buy them I'll try to find a used source in the area. The great thing about living in la s that there's tons of money and kids who want to learn 50 instruments they never follow through on, and for some reason mom and dad bought them a les Paul studio lol. Also, prs sound way better than new Gibsons so there's that option as well for the ma and pop shops, lol.