I took my tenor home with me last week, so I could work out a few arrangements and practice a bit at home. This instrument, my stage bass for ubik, is a cheap piece of gear bought specifically for me to ruin it-- a luthier has routed the body, another has redesigned a nut, almost half the hardware on it is additional... I'd never buy a good bass and perform this kind of surgery on a beautiful instrument, so I am (for all intents and purposes) using a piece of crap gear.
There's a bit of mythos, however, about the player sweating mojo into an instrument after years of use, and... honestly, I have really come to love this instrument. It's still not a great instrument, but it's got a lot of personality, and it's been with me for so long... hell, I've done more than half the frankenstein modifications on it myself. For a cheap bass that I've all but destroyed, I enjoy playing this disheveled machine as much as I enjoy playing beautiful, tasteful instruments.
(and, for the record, I've played one of Mike Watt's basses, and he treats those things with the kind of reckless abandon that my poor monster of a bass receives)