As a teenager, I had a cheap guitar and bashed out a bunch of 3 chord tunes for a while. I then didn't look at a guitar for 35 years, until about 18 months ago when I acquired an electric and started to learn to play "properly".

After a while I also acquired an acoustic, which I've now had for 8 months. It's a "cheap" (ha ha!) Martin DCX1. I've recently noticed that the frets are wearing quite significantly. I do play it now more than my electric (an Epiphone Les Paul) but the Epi has had 18 months use, the first 10 as my only guitar, and shows no sign at all of fret wear.

So how much wear is "normal" on an acoustic? I'm using Martin "extra light" (0.10) strings and am on my 4th set since purchase. I'm seeing very significant flat spots on the top 2 strings ( B & E) up to the 7th fret and another set of flat spots at the 10th to 12th. They vary in width, but are typically 2-3 mm wide and the ones on the first 3 frets have noticeable "dints" directly under the strings, while the remainder are just "flattened off" in a very shallow curve. There's slight wear on the first 3 frets under the wirewound strings, but not significant. The wear on the top strings is probably about 15-20% of the overall fret depth.

I probably bend my strings a bit more than most would on an acoustic. I probably on average play the guitar for an hour a day. Certainly no more, averaged over a week.

Would this level of wear be considered normal on a new acoustic used as I've described above? And will it ease off as the frets flatten? If it carries on at this rate I'll be looking at re-fretting about 2 years after purchase!