Al,
Do you find playing the guitar in the classical guitar position helps with aches and pains?
Kind of hard to tell because I've been doing it for about 40 years.
I
do believe it helped prevent the onset of repetitive stress injuries, particularly for commonly mentioned thumb issues on fretting hand, but by my late fifties I started noticing fatigue
between the shoulder blades if I tried to play a dreadnought for more than an hour.
This may have also been partly due to having cut way back on playing time in general from 5 or 6 hours to about 4 hours and then less than a couple of hours per week, due to various issues rooted in work-related stress. So there was gradual decline in stamina that might have ben maintained with more exercise.
It also led to the realization the F65ce was far less fatiguing to play overall, and I think the shallow depth was the biggest factor there.
I decided to give it a go one night after playing the D40 and realized I could give it another 1/2 hour without the backache.
I just don't have to stretch my right shoulder and back muscles as much as for the thickness of a dread.
PS since the Finesse was introduced in '97 I'd guess it probably
was Shaw and Bolen who had the majority of design input after starting with the basic DV-52 formula.
Floating bracing would have been the major design "customization" I've heard of so far.