I happen to have more guitars than you can shake a stick at. Knowing this, a friend asked me to go along with him to buy a guitar for his girlfriend. He ended up buying a "LAG". I'd never heard of them, not the sort of thing I'd have bought for myself, but all the ones I played sounded OK and had accurate intonation.

The trouble with asking the question you have is that if you ask 100 people what to buy you'll likely get 100 different answers. Unless you spend a lot of time playing above the 12th fret, I'd avoid guitars with cutaways. You will pay extra for one and if you're on a fixed budget you'll likely end up with a worse guitar.

Unless you're buying in the really cheap end of the market, I doubt whether you could buy a really bad guitar nowadays. I know there are people who will totally disagree with this and yes, some are better than others but a new guitar that you can't play, can't tune, won't stay in tune or won't play in tune, I suspect are long gone.