"Piano tuners started recognizing this problem 400 years ago. Unlike the piano, the guitar traces its roots to the less formal demands of folk and popular music. It didn't emerge as an important instrument until the middle of the last century. Yet with starring role comes heavier scrutiny: Guitars might be better built than ever, but we expect more of them too. For one thing, we expect them to play in tune. A trait shared by good players is ability to adjust tuning on the fly or mask dissonance with techniques like vibrato or bending. But even good players still face tuning woes, especially when playing chords alongside a piano"
Buzz has a thing about pianos, which he appears to regard as the apotheosis of perfection. On the one hand he is rejecting equal temperament while at the same time he is holding up the piano, an equal temperament instrument, as a suitable reference. In fact the piano is a very unreliable reference as it is tuned subjectively and then continues to drift from the optimum tuning until the next time it is tuned so a piano is really only a suitable reference immediately after it has been expertly tuned and at no other time. What Buzz fails to understand is that the reason for guitarists' "tuning woes" stems not from their use of equal temperament, but their failure to understand and observe it when tuning their guitars.
And while the guitar did not emerge until the late nineteenth century in the form we know it now its predecessors, the lute, viol and the vihuela were all important fretted instruments which were at the forefront of the development of tempered tunings. Both lute and viol were part of the armoury of the court musician and there was nothing folky or informal about the music played on them.
And there were no piano tuners 400 years ago , because there were no pianos.
