hahah what'dyu mean its "JUST a strat". strats are good okay, even the MIM ones.
i mean, if its a strat is so mass produced, its cheap (and very good too). so i guess its so pricey cuz its some ultra rare hand made guitar or something...
The price is high due to the fact that it's a semi hollow + branded. Proper semi-hollows are alot more difficult to make than solid bodies and I estimate them to take 3 times the amount of time required to make a solid body. This means that for every semi hollow made, Suhr is giving up his time to make 3 solid bodies costing around 3-4k for the lower end models each.
Name me any boutique guitar that doesn't costs thousands. The Singaporean market is too used to mass produced guitars to embrace the cost of boutiques yet. Same goes for amps. A mesa boogie is considered low end boutique already. Proper ones go for around 5k USD each.
Tone-wise, semi hollows/hollow bodies sound alot warmer than their solid body counterparts and feedback easily ie. controlled feedback but has less sustain. It's kinda like a smooth big fat tone without the spank or *immediate-ness* of solid bodies. An analogy would be the sound produced when using a metal rod to hit an object for solidbodies vs a metal rod wrapped in thin foam to hit an object for hollow bodies.
In Aerosmith's "I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" Armaggedon soundtrack, Joe Perry and Steven Tyler are using hollow bodies so go hear for yourself.