Cost of guitars v. cost of amps. Anyone else ever thought like this ?

Yeah. I figured out very quickly in my first year working at a music store where I got to have my hands on all kinds of gear every day that the amp is far more important to tone. It isn't the thing you're touching and it isn't the thing hanging from your belly facing out towards an audience so it is easily forgotten, but it is true. You can plug a Squier or Epiphone into a nice amp and get a better tone than a boutique guitar plugged into a budget amp every time. If you want to nail the sound on a recording, you're going to do better to duplicate the amp setup more than the guitar set up. With some amps, two very different guitars can sometimes sound very similar when plugged in. I knew a guitar teacher that was consistent in telling his students to always plug in when practicing. He'd say "when you're playing the guitar, you're REALLY playing the amp". He's not wrong.

Carr is a cool company. They're the only one I know of (of a certain size, anyway) that is prudently borrowing stuff from the hi-fi/audiophile world to make better guitar amps, instead of just doing variations of vintage circuits. As I get older I find I really like the kind of tone that uses those insufferable words to describe it like "natural", "transparent", "detailed", "depth", "woody"... and the choices Carr makes seem to do better for that kind of thing than just varying levels of gain and EQ. It is like most guitar amps sound like you're listening to music through a little bluetooth speaker, and then you get a chance to listen through a really nice stereo. Suddenly you can hear string squeak, kick drum pedals rocking, sax pads clacking, piano dampers moving back and forth... but that isn't how a lot of amp designers think these days. I'm not sure there is much money out there for people who want to go down that road with everything going digital, but I'm glad someone out there is thinking about it. I just wish they'd do more with 10-inch speaker configurations.

I’m kinda all over the map regarding this topic. Oddly enough my most expensive amp and and my most expensive guitar cost about the same.

The guitar (2017 LP Trad) probably prices out 10% more than I paid for it.

The amp (‘76 Marshall 1987) has probably gained in the the neighborhood of 50% more than I paid for it.

Another thought I have from time to time is that the duplication of vintage gear seems to be much further behind on amps than on guitars. I work on a lot of vintage guitars and I'm under no illusion that many builders are nearly as good at duplicating "vintage" as they want you to believe, but you can get something that has the same feel/vibe as a vintage piece pretty easily. In a lot of cases, you can get something decent more reliably, since a lot of vintage guitars are real dogs. Vintage amps on the other hand, always seem to sound a bit different. It might come down to speakers and nothing else, but I've heard it when new speakers are used as well. Amps seem a lot more quantitative in nature and should be easier to decode, but it doesn't seem to happen as often. Granted, I haven't gone down a very deep rabbit hole with vintage repro transformers or anything, but I still find it kinda funny.

This guitar cost vs amp cost is all over the map . If I were just starting out , I would absolutely spend more on the amp. Used you can get a decent amp for under 500 . Easy to find a solid guitar used for around 300 or less. That being said , now that I’ve been playing for a while , my main amps are a drri that I bought new for around 900 and a 59 bmri I bought for under 800. My cheapest guitar cost more than either of those. Once you throw boutique amps into the mix, you can throw reasoning out the window. For me my best mileage comes from about a 50/50 split.

It's all available.

A bunch of companies make things the 'old" way, and some still use NOS RCA ribbons to rebuild mics, et al.

Frankly, I'm happy with my $400 Behringer Pultec, myself.

it does the thing far better than any plugin I've touched, and has that magic.

Yep!  There's a saying that one can plug a crappy guitar into a stellar amp and still make it sound good, but not necessarily visa-versa.

If the guitar doesn't inspire me to play, I couldn't care less how good the amp is.

Agreed! My Maz 18 is the closest I've come to a Swiss Army Amp. The 3-band EQ is very dynamic and can simulate a Vox with the mids cranked or a Fender with the scooped mids, but it's still not the same as either amp. It does seem to prefer buckers over SC's unless the amp is cranked. Then the SC's will shine. But how often can you crank a Z? They're LOUD.