The stick is a pleasure to play if it plays properly, or well,. ( I guess it depends if you are a perfectionist or not, or what your ear and fingers are looking for. ). If you get a Stick that is not setup properly, you may be turned off.

The setup of the Stick is key

Buying a used instrument can be a crap shoot, unless you're willing to put the time into repairing or adjusting it to your specs, which can change over time as you become more proficient.

StickEmUp.

Those marks are positively indicative of a MIDI pickup having been previously installed. As you have observed, there was a wooden piece that was slid into the area where the MIDI pickup would have been installed.

You can see, from the 8th picture in the left, that the bridge was recut and retrofitted with a 3-d bridge (3 big bolts through the tail end of the instrument). I would request that anyone interested in this instrument have the seller provide an image of the tail portion of the instrument. When wooden bridges were filed down, there remained a very fragile tail to the instrument that could not be put down a hard surface as it would chip the "butt" of the instrument.

This is exactly what happened to my 1992 Paduak 10-string (180). He had to buff it out, making it even thinner. I did not commission this, but it was done and when I asked him about it, he called it "Stick Magic". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Glenn is on point, maybe half this much for an instrument with this many retrofits. While I am certain it was done by SE, these older instruments are more fragile and it becomes a big question as to whether to repair it, or in this case, buy a new one instead (along with a case, cable, shipping, etc). I do hope that the buyer asks around before agreeing to this price for a mid-90's retrofit. I always check the sold listing on reverb.com to get a fairly accurate depiction of the going rate based on the year of make, condition and accessories. So far, that's helped me to get a good price each time.