In a way, I consider this a good thing.
Objects don't have a memory, the cachet is 100% an emotional response by the owner/dealer/collector, and the stratospheric prices that 18th and early 19th century antiques have reached in recent years are unacceptable, in my view, because it means that they are the purview of only the very wealthy.
The insistence of dealers trying to extract exhorbitant prices from clients on "orginal surface" as a measure of authenticity is a pretty good example. The "original surface" they're discussing is simply dirt, grime, deteriorated finish and chemical oxidation, all of which can be accumulated in 200 years or 1 month, depending on the application method.
If you make a colonial style tea table in your shop by period methods (i.e., hand tools), and set it beside one made 220 years ago in Philadelphia, what makes the "authentic" one worth 200 hundred thousand dollars, and the one you made a "fake" worth at most a couple of thousand? Most dealers'scholars might reply "history", but that's assinine - the Philadelphia tea table has no "history" - that's an entirely human concept that has no bearing on an inanimate object. The are both tea tables, both made with hand tools, and of the same wood.
Should you so choose, and assuming you have the knowledge to go about it, you could add the "patina" so prized by the antiques world in a couple of months, and in a manner that doesn't rely on artificial means such as aniline dyes and lye. In fact, if done correctly, the composition of the patina that is added to the new piece would be chemically and physically indistinguishable from the 220 year old antique.
This is why I shake my head at an 8 million dollar price tag for a John Goddard tea table - I would personally far rather have a superb reproduction for $12,000 by Jeffrey Greene or Alan Breed, and put the rest of the money up for a better cause. It would not surprise me in the least if it were possible to ask the original maker the same question and he gave the same answer.
Taken a bit further, consider Shaker furniture. Some of these pieces have gone for well over $200,000, when they were designed to be simple, utilitarian forms whose value was solely based on what they could do, not what they were or who made them. The original Shakers would have no doubt been APPALLED that something so honestly made and used could be marketed in such a manner. In fact, there's a short essay by one of the Shaker sisters in Christian Becksvoort's book that alludes to this idea - the sister laments that her order is most remembered for the furniture that it produced rather than their dedication to the service of God.