Regarding the impact of time on a guitar/instrument and how much of an advantage time is for a guitar to sound good I found this:
"It was reported in late March 2001 that Joseph Nagyvary, a biochemist at Texas A&M University,
succeeded in making a violin somewhere near the quality of a
Stradivarius by leaving the wood in sea water for a period of time.[7] Due to lack of land space in Venice, in former times, imported wood was often stored in water in the Venice Lagoon, where a type of rotting affected it slightly. He managed to get hold of some wood shavings from a Stradivarius violin, and under a microscope he found that in that wood the natural filter plates in the pores between the tracheids had disappeared. He also, reportedly, treated the wood with borax.
By late 2003, Nagyvary had refined his techniques and produced a
violin that was tested in a duel between it and a top-tier Stradivarius.[8]
Both violins were played in each of four selections of music.
World-class violinist Dalibor Karvay performed behind a screen to an
audience of 600 (including 160 trained musicians and 303 regular
concert attendees). This was the first public comparison of a great
Stradivari with a new violin in front of a large audience. The audience
cast ballots for the violins' tone qualities and projection. The
results indicated that Nagyvary's instrument surpassed the Stradivarius
by a small margin in each category." Now I don't want to get into what makes a Strad sound good - the point is simply that in a blind listening test 600 people deemed a new instrument to sound as good or better as a top rated Strad.
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