Are there any reports of early made WOZ's with a lot of plays and not this type of severe wear?

For the record I think JJP should give TaylorVA a replacment playfield at no charge. Hes been in on WOZ since the beginning. Without the preorder customers JJP wouldn't be around today.

Same here. At this point the best approach is to just mylar the potential wear areas to avoid taking any risk of playfield wear. My game was made in October 2013 and I'm not planning on playing it again until I put the mylar kit down, haha.

It seems like a run of them, could even be only certain ones in a run. PinCrush mentioned that he has an even earlier game then TaylorVA's but doesn't see any wear.

I agree with what RobT said above. Any game with a Bader playfield that develops this issue should have it replaced free of charge. At the very least JJP should do that for the original owners of the game.

This above makes it even more bizarre to me that mylar wasn't put on various locations on the game from the factory. There's a lot in WOZ and you can see attention to detail on top and under the playfield so I'm just surprised something as simple as mylar was missed / forgotten about. Hopefully The Hobbit has mylar placed in all potential wear areas.

September 2015? You are from the future!? lol

I would personally put mylar down in the State Fair area regardless if I had the older or newer playfield. That area will see a lot of traffic with how many times a pinball bounces back and forth. I'm surprised mylar wasn't put down at the factory in this area. Better be safe then sorry as like others have said "steel will always win over wood".