Apprentices make mistakes and don't know it.
Journeymen make mistakes and hide them.
Masters make mistakes, but they are part of their style.
"Any fool can learn from his own mistakes; a wise man learns from those of others" Bismark
I still make mistakes, after thirty+ years of building, but they are getting to be less problematic and more stylistic (Am I becoming a Master? Dare I dream?). My big problem now is the mistakes the students make when I'm not watching them closely enough. I really want to see people go out with a guitar _I_ could be proud of, but the reality is that they get ahead of me sometimes, and do dumb things before I can catch them. It sure doesn't take long to screw something up, particularly with a router....
A lot of the 'mistakes' I make these days are things that only matter cosmetically: brace pockets that are a little wide, for example. The guitar won't fall apart because of it, but it just looks lees than wonderful.
Bindings, purflings and rosettes are ever-productive sources of mistakes, as you've found. When you lose a rosette line like that you can often go back and re-inlay it if you didn't cut out the hole and lose the guide hole. We had to do that recently with a student's guitar: the replacement ring came out great except it has one extra line in it, which most people won't pick up. He could, of course, have replaced the other circle to make them the same.
BTW, I've seen expensive instruments from really well-known makers with mistakes. One was a guitar that the fellow had paid $12,000 for that had a chunk taken out of the top by the builder. It was glued back in, but not well. In another case I worked on a guitar from a maker known for his artistic skill that had a rosette inlaid on the _inside_ of the top. It had been sanded through, so he just flipped the wood and made that the inside, putting in a new rosette. A builder I know had the router blow out a piece of the top when he was cutting the binding rabbet, and did a beautiful 'finger' patch to fix it. He challenged me to find it, and I did, but only because I know where the router always blows out the top. I had taught him the patching method years before: it was a good repair and he had every reason to be pleased with it(especially since the guitar sounded so good).
My violin making teacher said she would never let us get away with some of the stuff Strad did. If your instrument sounds that good, nobody objects when one of the F-holes is 1/16" higher up than the other or the corners don't match. Again, part of the 'style'.
As for telling folks...
I don't normally tell people about things that I consider only 'cosmetic', like those brace pockets. We all have our notions of what is and is not a 'serious' problem, of course. I figure if it's not something that's going to cause structural or acoustic problems down the road they don't need to know.
OTOH, I do tell folks about those important things. I had shipped a Tenor violin to a fellow set up, and the end pin had gotten knocked, which broke the glue line around the end block on the top, and cracked the top on one side up from the saddle. He refused the instrument, and shipped it back for a refund. I was able to glue the crack together nearly invisibly and put patches on the inside to hold it, so it was a strong as could be expected. When I sold the instrument I was careful to tell the customer before hand about the problem and give her a chance to back out. It will probably never jump up and bite her, but if it does....
Remember, if somebody buys something and they like it, they tell their frinds. If they buy something and don't like it, they tell _everybody_.
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