I find this discussion interesting, as it is what has been seen in the sporting good industries, most notably golf shafts and hockey sticks.

Golf shafts in drivers were all steel a very short 10-15 years ago.  By going to graphite, designers were able to make a lighter weight shaft, with specific attention paid to the consistency of its design and performance.  By specifically engineering the product in a certain way, it allowed them to design in the exact characteristics they wanted.

In hockey, we also see this with the shift in the last 8 or so years to composite hockey sticks.  Lighter, with more consistent flex profiles, the product is again engineered to meet the specific traits required by the hockey player.  What does this have to do with CF violins?'

Well, if engineers can determine a weave and quality of any composite material that meets the resonant qualities they want in a violin, then these could become very common.  It is not unthinkable they could eventually replace the inconsistent wood violins, and with time, in a less expensive manner.

However, musical instruments are different than sporting equipment.  Sporting equipment does not have "tone", "expression", "resonance" or "character".  It is instead purpose-designed to perform a physical event in a consistent manner.  Reproducing music is also a physical event, but one in which consistency is not always the goal.

So neat idea, and something that could eventually be great for student violinists.  However, I would suggest that the properties that go into the use of composites for consistency would be exactly the type of thing that would not appeal to the advanced or professional musician, who want the unique characteristics each wood violin has.

Hm.  Relating to Scooter's analogy to sporting equipment, there is one additional thought I can bring into that picture.

Take for instance, baseball, which takes the official position in both the major and minor leagues that everybody must use a wooden bat of specific weight/dimensions.  In little league games, and private leagues and so on, there is nothing restricting the use of aluminium or other materials, but major leaguers are still stuck with the same bat as ever.  In effect, you have a measuring stick that keeps the comparisons level between the athletes of today and the athletes of years back.

Comparatively, you have something like pole vaulters, where the introduction of fiberglass meant you had a sudden increase in how high people could jump.  In my sport of tennis, when I first started playing, we only had wood and/or steel frame rackets with relatively small faces, but now there are graphite, fiberglass, carbon fiber and aerogel-fill rackets with faces that are over double the size and synthetic strings with all kinds of grip on them...  all of a sudden, people are hitting harder, getting more spin on every shot, and the points are much shorter.  It doesn't necessarily mean the athletes are better, though the combination of athlete and equipment is certainly better.

At the same time, having that kind of technology and a wide variety of different available technologies means that there is a big question between how much in the difference between two athletes of the same generation is related to their equipment and how much is their respective abilities?  On the other hand, consistency in the equipment at least takes the equipment variable out of the equation as long as you're comparing two people of the same generation.  In the case of baseball, they did it by keeping the rules consistent over the years.  Current violins have something closer to the former problem in that there are a wide range of products of widely varying quality, and because it involves component materials which are inherently inconsistent, you don't even have a guarantee that a $50 violin you bought at a garage sale will actually be any worse than a $9000 you bought from a professional luthier/craftsman.

Now, for instance, you can take a beginner violinist who, given an honest-to-goodness Guarneri del Gesu to play on, would probably make some sounds that may cause listener suicide rates to climb.  And then you compare that to someone as experienced as FM, who even with a rather poor-quality VSO that's badly setup, can sound quite good.  Even then, he'd probably say that it's not as good as it could sound, so the effective gap is smaller than the actual difference between the players.  But then if you can make the next generation of VSOs of such high quality that they all generally outstrip the results that the old masters could produce...  then the only difference is one of skill, experience, and the "sense" for music.