The problem with engineering the guitar for mass production is that you're stuck using wood most of the time, and wood varies. If you measure the Young's modulus along the grain, which tells you something about the potential stiffness of the top, you'll find that even two pieces of wood of the same species can vary by +/- 20% from an 'average' value. Cross grain stiffness varies even more. No manufacturer of cars, say, would put up with that sort of variation in his materials; it would be darn near impossible to build something with predictable performance. So why do people expect production guitars to have predictable sound?
Guitar manufacturers have to assume that the weakest top is going to end up with the weakest bracing, so they need to over build to avoid a lot of warrenty work. Even a bit of input quality control helps, but the fact is that you can't tell from looking at it what the properties of a piece of wood are. You really need to use deflection testing, or some similar method. All of those methods take time, and time is the most expensive input in mass production.
Luckily for the manufacturers the design of the guitar is so highly developed that anything that looks pretty much like a guitar will sound like one. Given the number of badly made ones out there, even a little attention paid to materials, and workmanship at what we'd consider a 'barely acceptible' level, will get you a better than average guitar. And, since the objective difference between and 'average good' guitar and a 'great' one is really small (again, characteristic of a highly developed design) that better than average box will be pretty easy to sell if it looks OK.
Which, of course, is why the manufacturers stress fit and finish. 'Fit' is easy to get in a mass production setting: it's the only way to get reproducibility, so you have to do it anyway. 'Finish' is one of those things that you can throw money at: none of us could justify the sort of spray rig that Martin needs to have to keep up with production, nor will we have people who spend all of their time getting good at spraying and buffing.
That's why I think it's a mistake for us to try to compete on those grounds. It's not a game we can win, and as long as we let them set the rules, we'll lose. We need to get the customers thinking about what we can do that manufacturers can't: make boxes that excel at producing music. Lars spent $1200 on a box that couldn't, and so do lots of other folks. They just don't usually rip the top off to find out why.
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