Look into Driskill guitars sometime, I personally think they're better instruments and Joe is completely legendary for his friendly approach to business. It's not hard to find customers who found Ed arrogant and condescending and a general asshole, but I seriously doubt Joe has ever had a customer in his life who wasn't perfectly happy about everything. Read the reviews for him sometime, they're better than Ed's.

Or Thorn, or Chapin, or Lentz, or Abyss, or Victor Baker. See, what Ed doesn't realize is that what he likes and what fills his wallet isn't what's perfect or what's best for everybody, and he doesn't do business on as much of a personal level, which I believe is necessary when dealing with custom guitars. Any one of those companies I mentioned could build the perfect guitar for you with everything you could ever dream of in a guitar and you would never need another guitar in your life unless it was stolen. Ed Roman seems more like he pieces together his model guitars by general properties and ships them out indiscriminately. Slap a thin neck on a quicksilver or pagan and solder it all together and he's done. Many other, and I believe better, luthiers will go out of their way to make the guitar for you. They will shape every little part of the construction to fit your every choice in tonal nuance and feel and make sure they understand what it is you're looking for (it's not uncommon hearing stories of how a certain luthier was able to 'snatch' a tone from someone's head they were having a hard time putting into words. very amazing, imo), they will go out of their way to make sure the guitar is what you want (I've heard stories of Joe mailing people guitar necks in the middle of construction to make sure they were perfectly satisfied with the feel and look of it), things like that.