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Abranet (dry) and Abralon (wet) machine sanding - great stuff, and lasts close to forever...a bargain. Abranet is brilliant stuff for hand-sanding as well - especially on the sort of sinuous contours I deal with on a routine basis. One of the few abrasives that - with a current gen Dyabrade ROS - will handle big density differences and still keep things flat. Dust collection is much more effective with net abrasives - the difference in the debris left after ROS sanding at 150 with Abranet and the Dynabrade (air) or Festool ROS and hand sanding is stark - inspection with a 10x shows that much of the junk that resides in pores or as ragged feathers of fiber on a hand sanded stick gets cleared by the ROS action and vacuum.

The difference between current tech abrasive and tools and the last gen stuff that remains in use is akin to the difference between those old white grinding wheels we used back in the last century and the CBN wheels that are replacing seeded gel stuff.

Still lots of planing and scraping in anything I build commercially, but without much of a tradition of parsing tasks by hand tool or power tool use as is prevalent in cabinetmaking and furniture work, luthiers (and boatbuilders) are more likely than not going to use whatever is at hand and can get the job done to standard.

I'll gladly trade money for time at my shop's hourly, but there is a cost associated with both tooling and consumables that should be considered - that point was well made and emphasizes the need to consider all costs...a Dynabrade with a good dust collection system and a compressor big enough to drive it is close to my daughter's monthly tuition bill. A good card scraper, a mill file, and a burnisher runs about what a 50 pack of abrasive disks runs. Without a revenue stream to tickle, it is tough to see any argument about time and money being meaningful, as there is no ROI which can be monetized.