While you can automate the bulk production of instruments, you cannot make anything truly great. A core principal of making a violin is graduation of the plates

While you can automate the bulk production of instruments, you cannot make anything truly great. A core principal of making a violin is graduation of the plates with utmost care and consideration of the woods being used. For example: If I take 10year old sub 5k ft altitude american spruce and 100yr old +5k Alpine spruce and have a machine carve them out I will get dramatically different tonal results. And that's before I change all of it by varnishing. Automation may be good for sheer volume, but in this case it will never be good for uniform "higher quality".