CST-24T Ocean Flame : Tuning Issues

First impressions, it is beautiful and the finish is flawless.

Neck is poker-straight with the most comfortable neck-joint/cutaway I've ever played.

I lowered the action, tweaked the intonation and changed the strings to my preferences.

Pickups sound great, even for metal, and they clean up well rolling off the volume knob.

The bad: The cheap plastic nut needs work. I can see that the strings are binding in the slots. Had to tune after every song at band practice, even without using the trem.

In 30 years, I've only played guitars with locking nuts, so I'm used to the thing staying in tune no matter what.

The push-pull pickup splitter knob hardly makes a change. This was my main reason for getting this guitar

as I'm in a cover band doing all styles of rock. I suspect it's the low-budget pickups...

I could fix all the problems, but I just don't want to sink any more money into this thing.