UPDATE -- I have a happy ending in my quest to get an acoustic Gibson, yesterday I bought a J-45 Standard, but not the one I described in my initial post in this thread, but a different one, made in 2015 and in immaculate condition.
A couple of days ago I spotted it in the ads for sale, the price was good, the pictures and description excellent, so I needed to act fast which I did. We met at a parking lot, the seller brought the guitar by car as she is living in Moscow region, and I came by subway to the last faraway station. It was in the open air, quite noisy, the guitar had the factory installed strings which were dead, of course. I tuned the guitar but it was hardly possible to understand its tone. Anyway, I examined the guitar, everything was stock, almost no signs of use, just two very tiny dings like this on the soundboard --
The action was perfect, no cracks and no other visible defects at all. On the pickguard I noticed the protective plastic film --
There were two spare sets of strings in the case -
The young lady who was selling it said that the guitar was bought back in 2015 as a present to her father who eventually was not very much excited to play it, so it was in the closet for years.
When I came home and played the guitar with these dead strings, I was amazed by the lush complex tone it produced, so it was not a dud!
Overall, I am very happy that I got J-45. After abandoning the idea to buy this beaten up and scratched J-45 I wrote above, I was reluctantly thinking on settling on J-35 (there are three J-35 in the ads currently), since used J-45 are very rare in the ads and I cannot afford to buy it new, way too expensive. So the sudden luck of spotting a good one and buying it I see as a kind of Jungian synchronicity. I watch the guitar ads daily and I did not spot this J-45 which was listed on 25 April. I decided to look at the bottom of the ads and suddenly saw it. My guess is that the seller initially listed the guitar in Moscow region area and it was not visible to Moscow city, then she edited the ad making it visible to Moscow city, but the listing remained in the bottom, did not jump to the top (one has to pay for shooting it to the top). So, very few people saw it. This is the end of the story and my quest for a better guitar!
