If you pay "x" IMO you deserve to get something that sounds like "x" (or close to it). Manufacturers know what a good uke sounds like, even if a buyer may not.
If you were buying something like a KORG keyboard then I would absolutely agree.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works in luthiery. The fault lies in that our materials, primarily woods, will always be inconsistent from one piece to the next.
You can follow the plans perfectly. You can carve your necks to precision with a CNC machine. You can graduate a soundboard to exact specifications. Yet, in the end, you have absolutely no guarantee that the resulting instrument will sould as good as your last best one. Classical guitarists who played Segovia's Hauser rave that it truly is an outstanding instrument; but many would agree that neither Hauser nor any of his children have produced an instrument of the same caliber. It's a given that all the knowledge, experience, skills and tools have been preserved in that dynasty and yet they cannot re-build the epitome of their legacy.
The best end comes from a player who knows what he or she is looking for at a price that they want to pay, and from an instrument that fulfills those needs at their price. It often means a lot of searching and requires patience.
For those who haven't yet refined their ears (and all of us probably still are), you can either call in a more experienced player and trust his or her tastes, or your can give yourself time to educate and cultivate your own. The more you listen and the more you play, the better you will get.
Keep in mind too that every ukulele will, to varying degrees, sound different in each player's hands. We all have variations in our technique (attack, power, angle). Some ukes will respond well to these. Some will not.
P.S.: Even the more experienced players will disagree on what constitutes good tonal qualities in an instrument. Classical guitarist John Williams considers the $30,000+ Smallman guitars to be the best instruments he has encountered to date. He also doesn't like Ramirez guitars and referred to them as "orange boxes" in an interview. Yet there are guitarists who think that Ramirez guitars are melodic and that Smallman guitars sound like banjos.
There's no accounting for taste.
