If you've never built a guitar before, I recommend starting with Strat, Super Strat, or Tele that you like but want to do something like change the pickups or repaint the body....
... then take the guitar COMPLETELY apart.
Being able to reassemble a guitar, resolder the electronics, and perform a decent setup are INTEGRAL parts of the process. They're MUCH easier to do when the neck, pickups, saddles, etc etc etc all are made for each other.
Quite often when mixing and matching frankenstein parts, you find this neck pocket is too big, too small, too shallow, the holes for the string ferrules don't line up with the bridge, this trem is too wide for this neck and the E strings are falling off the sides of the neck. These are all common obstacles but if you've never built a guitar before, you'd just assume that you suck at guitar building and made some kind of useless piece of junk. It's much easier when you're only overcoming one or two retrofit issues and not a metric shit ton.
If that process works for you... try out a kit, where again, the pieces are made for each other.
At some point, you may try cutting your own wood, installing your own truss rod, doing your own fret work.... at some point you will either love it...
or find the threshold of your tolerance.
My threshold has changed over the years... since I'm busy playing in bands now, I have zero patience for fret work. Repaint, resolder, rebuild, set up... that's all fine but I'd rather pay someone to do my frets while I have band practice.
Setting up lots of guitars is important because when you run into a problem like how much relief on the fingerboard... raising and lowering saddles vs neck shim... recutting the nut... these are all issues that can be overcome but you need to be able to accurately identify which one is the issue.
