The 'quality guitar' market varies so much from instrument to instrument like the poster above I would NEVER drop my hard earned ducets on an unseen/unheard guitar.

Well, maybe a pre-war D-18S, but that's about it.

That being said given a choice between scalloped and unscalloped bracing I'd go/w the one w/scalloped. I bought a '79 D-35S and then spent another 200.00 to have the bracing scalloped by a local luthier. The difference was AMAZING.