I'm going to try and keep a positive attitude in hopes of good karma sending me a JTV69 in good shape. Obviously i'll check the knobs before i unpack everything else; it looked fine at first, so I unpacked the charger, cords, etc, before realizing we had a problem. I even googled "crooked variax tone knob" to see if it was some strange intended design. Since it did in fact turn all the way around, it probably would have been a functional tone knob if I had kept it. But it just didn't seem like something I should accept on a guitar that costs 1K.
I really don't want the unintended irony of me starting a thread asking to convince me to buy one, and then being convinced, and then having to send two of them back. I'm a Line6 fan, i've owned a Pod X3 Live, a 500 and now a 500HDx , and was a happy owner of a used Variax 500 that looking back I should have held onto to since it was perfect (i sold when the JTV's came out but then had a job change that made it difficult to re-purchase, and i had two non-variax guitars I was happy with).
So if i post about damaged product and being disappointed, I hope everyone here knows it's not that I have it out for Line 6.