My accoustic guitar was weeping as I read your post to it.
It too has been forced off the stage because of my ukes and quite often I will see the guitar case sitting all abandoned in the corner of the lounge room and feel very guilty that I hardly ever play it lately. Before the uke fever took hold I lived for my guitar, It was the instument I had spent decades learning and mastering, I had worked my way through many guitars over the years on my search for the right one, and for the last few years have been really making huge steps in playing ability and knowledge of how to set up and care for my instrument.
Now the case stays zipped up for weeks at a time, I think I had a set of elixers rust out on the guitar over summer and I only played them about 3 times, thats 10 bucks a strum almost lol, Also I have been a lot more confident working on the ukes, playing with the set up, filing nuts and bridges, making new nuts and bridges, swapping string sets around ect.... On the guitars I am always terrified of breaking or ruining them when doing anything more extreme than a string change, reaching for the truss rod adjuster or thinking of replacing the nut on one of my guitars could lead to an expensive disaster, and a costly trip to the luthier, but hey, my most expensive uke is a few hundred dollars, so almost a throwaway replaceable item at this level, lots of fun, real hands on stuff, and no worry of destruction.
Snap the neck or warp the body of my main guitar and its a sad day, snap the neck on a 100 dollar uke and you throw it in the bin, string up another cheapy with a set of aquilas and your plinky plonking away again in no time.
I would probably feel different if I had a martin 5k uke, but its very unlikely that will ever happen, i think unless you are Jake or someone like him why would you buy an expensive uke, the whole point of ukes to me is that they are cheap fun things, an antidote to all the seriousness in the world, I've met a few people with really expensive ukes, and you know what, they cant play any better than me, in fact most times I can make a 100 dollar uke sound better than their 1000 dollar one, why ?, because I can play, because i practiced for hours and hours to get good, and for that, a cheap one is just fine, makes you work a bit harder in some ways too.
That is the line that seperates uke owners into 2 groups, the real musos and the collectors, that may as well be collecting old clocks or 18th century chairs, sure they have passion for quality, for craftsmanship, for great timber, but they ARE NOT MUSICIANS, any more than people who collect Rembrandts are painters.
I usually find that the real passionate players, musicians to the very core, dont have the money to buy steinways, or martins or Stradivarius or gold flutes or any other instrument that is the top of the range, those kind of musos can bring a room to life and get everyone singing along to a 50 dollar pawn shop acoustic, But you go to a middle class dinner party and have some ponce who works in the city pull out his 10 grand martin custom, and he cant play it for s**.
Ok I'll stop rambling on like an old man on a park bench.
sometimes I just get lost and wander off at a tangent, what were we talking about again ? Oh yes guitars v ukes.
Well your post has inspired me to take the guitar out, plug it in and give it a really good play for the rest of today, for once the uke can sit in the corner feeling left out.
thanks for you post, it got me all fired up lol.