Official Luthiers Forum!

You can't discount the psychological factor either. You need both guitars in front of you. I can't tell you how many times people have told me that a guitar has a problem that their other guitar doesn't have, only to find out that they just didn't notice that their other guitar was doing the same. They were just more familiar with their old guitar and more used to how it felt and sounded.

When people get a new guitar or have one worked on, they're scrutinizing it to death and notice things they otherwise would overlook.

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Old growth, shmold growth!

The dreaded body/neck hump:
Could be too much 'set' in the neck
could be corrected by a tapered shim under the fretboard extention (A very good tutorial in the tutorial section... maybe by Todd Stock??)
since you have unseated frets in the upper registers, it may be possible to remove all the frets. re-level the fingerboard, and take out the 'hump', re-fret ( maybe to include cutting fret slots deeper at the hump region) ...

...underbuilt/inadequate upper transverse brace...?