You already have the opinion of one watchmaker here. The author is member ATracyWatches.
I've not serviced a 3235, so only going by what was written there, I think he's got it pretty much right. Some of the things touted as "new" are of course nothing of the sort. For example escape wheels that are "skeletonized" have been around for a long time. Seiko uses them actually...and years ago I was in the shop of independent maker Romain Gauthier, who had already done this to the escape wheel:
Note not only hollowed but the spokes strengthened through the use of arcs. And he took it one step further than Rolex, and did the same with the pallet fork:
I agree with his assessment of the barrel changes, and again this harkens back to the 60's and 70's with sealed mainspring barrels in brands like Bulova, Longines, and Zodiac that were never designed to be open, so nothing particularly new about that. in most service center settings, complete barrels are replaced anyway, and although it's incredibly wasteful, for the service center it makes sense. These brands don't care about what watchmakers outside of their service centers need...
Probably where we differ the most is in the use the ball bearing. This is finally Rolex bringing their designs into the 1970's, but I agree it's unfortunate that the whole rotor has to be replaced. Omega does this too on some models, and it's never a good thing to have to replace a rotor for $260 when a ball bearing for $50 could do the job if they had just made it something that can be replaced. But this again is something being designed for manufacturing, rather than being designed for servicing.
Cheers, Al
