That might have been the underlying reason. I thought the overt reason was some BS over rare woods they used in some of their guitars.
Sometime in the middle of 2011, the EPA or some derivative thereof raided Gibson’s Nashville factory and confiscated all the rosewood claiming it was endangered or protected species or some such crap. The rosewood was intended to be used for making the fretboards. Of course the Chinese are the largest consumers of rosewood because they just love furniture made out of it. How many Gibson fretboards could be made from the wood needed for one rosewood dining room table or “China” cabinet? The upshot for Gibson was that in order to finish the instruments in the production schedule, they had to substitute another wood and chose “Torrified Maple” which was just maple that was baked to a darker finish. Most all instruments affected were the bottom end Les Pauls. Last winter I had a Jones for a P-90 guitar and there was a nice looking 2011 Studio in Honeyburst at a local used shop that I saw on their website. I went to the shop to play it and loved the neck shape, the pickups, the tone and volume controls and the light weight. But something was off about the feel of the fretboard which looked like rosewood but felt rough like unsanded barn siding. I asked the kid at the counter and he said it was rosewood. I borrowed their magnifying glass and damned if it wasn’t baked maple. A total deal killer. I wrote down the serial number of that guitar and got the date of manufacture info from a website and sure enough it was dated October of 2011. A couple of months after the raid. If they would have knocked a couple of hundred off the price, I would have bought it and taken it to a local luthier guru and had the board replaced with rosewood or, my favorite, ebony.