if it makes your guitar sound better why be sarcastic about it?
This is the fundamental issue - DOES it make your guitar sound better? As you know, great tone is essentially subtractive. If high frequencies and optimized sustain were more appealing to the human ear than a tone which is reduced in certain frequencies by the choices of construction materials, we'd all be playing maple guitars, or even granite, aluminum and steel-bodied ones. Swamp ash absorbs and deadens more frequencies than maple, mahogany deadens even more highs. We even don't amplify electric guitars through speaker systems with tweeters or high-frequency horns, because those frequencies above about 6K are unpleasant to the human ear. Look at the frequency curves of the guitar speaker at USSpeaker.com - they die off completely above 6K.
So: the question is, does using a softer zinc bridge ON A LES PAUL result in a sound that has been historically pleasing, collectively, to a large number of people? That answer would be "YES!" Do tastes change? Of course! Is it possible, even likely, that a "soft" bridge on a harder wood would emit a frequency range similar, or even functionally identical to a harder bridge on a softer wood? Well, sure, maybe.... where's the research? Over the next few decades I'm sure we will hear recordings of guitars with machined steel bridges - I look forward to it! However, the assertion that these DO make guitars sound "better" remains just an assertion, until the evidence starts to pile up.
There have been machine shops, stainless steel, and wildly-experimenting guitarists for 40 years now (counting back to Rick Turner, Alembic etc.) I'm not even remotely a traditionalist - I don't care "how Leo did it" - but every week there's a new, better, greater "improvement" in tone - yet the standards for great tone relate back to what we've been trained to hear as "correct"... I don't
hate billet tunematics, I just want to hear the EVIDENCE that this is finally the Keys to the Kingdom. And Gee, what'll it be next week? :dontknow: