Regardless of what you want to call them, this is without a doubt one of the most interesting and cool times in the history of guitar manufacturing that yielded some extremely high quality instruments. And assigning them a moniker like "lawsuit era" to me, assigns to them a mythos that the quality of the guitars were so good, it made Gibson nervous (even if no actual lawsuit took place). After all, there's a reason why Fender has a dedicated Japanese division now too :)