Washburn WG-587 initial impressions

OK, so I just bought one of the cheap Washburns off of eBay and received it about 4 hours ago. I'll get pics up when I can, but wouldn't you know it, I can't find a memory card for my camera right now. Anyway, after playing with it for a bit, these are my initial impressions.

First of all, to give you an idea of where I'm coming from, my main guitar is a Carvin DC135. Let me say this: Nothing will make you appreciate your custom made neck-thru like buying a mass manufactured bolt-on. Upon unpacking the guitar, I discovered that it was slightly damaged. It looks as if at some point, it took a severe impact right by the dot on the fifth fret on the side of the neck. There's a chip of wood missing right by and around the dot. It's mainly cosmetic, and in a place where I won't feel it while playing in any sort of normal manner, but disappointing none the less. The guitar was shipped to me double boxed, and there are no matching dents in either of the boxes, so I have to assume it happened when Washburn was packing it. Also, it looks like they cut the screw holes and slot for the 3 way switch after the guitar was finished, and there's a bunch of encrusted sawdust around the screws I'll have to find a way to clean up. Once again, purely cosmetic. The finish a little boring, being gray and all, but looks nice.

As for the playability of the guitar...not bad. This is my first 7 string, and I was able to pretty much take to it right away. The neck is nice and smooth, although the frets need some cleaning up.

As for the sound...ugh. Once again, I might be spoiled by my Carvin, but I use the stock pickups in that, and the stocks on the Washburn are not good. I actually don't mind the neck pickup, as when I use it I'm usually looking for a kind of muted tone anyway, but the bridge pickup is total crap. The only way I can get it to sound anywhere near good is to boost the hell out of the high frequencies in the parametric EQ on my PODxt Live. I think the stock strings don't help much either...kind of flappy...all together flappy strings + bad pickup = poop.

I can't say I regret the purchase...I only paid $150 for it, so I wasn't expecting much. However, I'll probably have to put the same amount of money into a pickup, nut, set-up, strings, etc. to get it to sound good. I'm new to the forum, but have seen the many pickup threads, so I won't ask about those here. However, has anyone successfully replaced the nut on one of these, and if so, what did you get?