About the Fender Newporter...?

Sweetwater was following up with me on the gig bag I bought from them for my Jim Dandy, so I began to nose around, and was checking out their "Deals" section. Among the acoustic-electric guitars there, they were advertising the Fender California Series Newporter Special 2018 - 2019. They have four of them (one thing I like about Sweetwater is that you can view photos of the actual guitars!), and they are all pretty nice looking geets with some nice specs:

Solid mahogany top
Mahogany back and sides
Mahogany neck with pau ferro fingerboard
Fishman-designed pickup/preamp system
Slim-taper "C"-shaped neck profile with 15.75" radius
Bone nut and saddle
Aged white binding
Scalloped X-bracing
Pau ferro modern Viking bridge
Classic Fender 6-in-line headstock

Sweetwater's "deal" pricing on one of these is $749.99US. So, it's not your basic beginner's guitar. Still, at that price (which is actually MSRP) it could vie for someone's wallet who's in the market for an all-hog acoustic-electric.

But for some reason, Fender's acoustics never get high grades. Why is that?

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/03...g?v=1591593798