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Its kind of hard to explain.
So, when you glue a bridge on to a guitar, you need to have a good wood to wood glue joint. If you don't, you will have problems with bridges pulling off all the time, which sucks. However, it would be extremely difficult to finish a guitar properly with the bridge in place (particularly as you finish the neck and the body separately - well, most of us do, and it makes for a better finish - which means you are not 100% sure EXACTLY where the bridge will end up). So, you finish the guitar, set the neck, and then you measure very carefully for the bridge placement, scribe a line around the bridge, and remove the finish inside the line. There are a lot of ways to do this (we use a little bit of paste stripper to remove most of it, and clean up with some chisels and sandpaper).
All this is fine so far.
Now, because they want to build as many guitars as they can sell as profitably as possible, Martin whatever modern factory equipment they can. Which is fine, you can still do good work that way (as they always have), and these days it means they use a lot of CNC machines. The CNC machine they use to remove the finish where the bridge is going to go basically uses a very fine end mill (a twisty sort of router bit) to remove the finish under the bridge.
Again, that's fine by me, as I know many guys who remove the finish with just a plain old router. You need to be insanely careful with your depth setting, but if you can do it I say, more power to ya!
The problem is, Martin takes of more than just the finish. They take off a bit of top wood, essentially inlaying the bridge a few thousandths of an inch into the top. In the day to day life of the guitar, this doesn't matter one wit. Where it becomes a problem, however, is when that bridge needs to be replace. Maybe it cracks, or it starts to lift or something. Well, anything I want to do to remove that bridge so I can reglue it requires that I get at the glue line - WHICH IS NOW BURIED INSIDE THE TOP OF THE GUITAR!!!!! There are a lot of ways to remove a bridge. The most common one these days is to heat up the bridge, and use a very thin palate knife or spatula to pry off the melting glue. An older and (I think) better method is to take a very sharp chisel, and place the cutting edge of the chisel right at the glue line, and give it a whack. You do this around the perimeter of the bridge until it pops off (the reason I like this method more is it typically takes significantly less wood out of either the top or the bridge - but it takes a lot more skill and practice. You don't want to try this one on your own!) Neither of those will work with this new Martin design, and it is going to be a nightmare to do the amount of touch up which will be required.
Now, I should say that we haven't actually needed to do this yet - we recently asked the guys in Martin's repair department about this, and they said they had not seen any yet either but were also worried about the issue - so it could be I'm seeing goblins in the shadows, but I doubt it. Every repair person I've spoken to about this has the same concerns, and that has me concerned. However, your guitar may never need a bridge reglue, and you may never have to worry about it, so it's up to you if you want to be concerned.
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"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
