So is this like taking a chunk of wood out of the piece of wood by cutting a hole in it so you get a window (which is both wooden and, technically, transparent, well, mostly), or like taking a piece of wood and then running it through a chain of chemical reactions ending up with some transparent substance which, in its chemical structure, may not even resemble wood at all?
There was an avenue of organ cloning being researched a few years ago. The idea was to treat all available organs as substandard (in that if it's not yours, you're buying time while you fight organ rejection for the rest of your days).
I bring it up here because it was a lot like delignification. Printing organs doesn't really work, but what if we took a random liver, removed all of the organic matter except the collagen, and then introduced a small sample of your cells into that collagen. Can we get it to grow into a functioning organ that is completely genetically compatible with you? The answer was 'maybe'.
Or perhaps a little less fanciful, delignification is kind of a bit like organic aerogel. Aerogel is a foam of two substances and we remove one. We are limited in the structures that can be produced. Pore size and variability and such.
Meanwhile we can an inferior carbon aerogel out of wood that has enough surface to volume ratio to work as a capacitor. And if we make them out of bamboo, they work even better. Do other plants have a better structure? Can we use nature or nurture to tune that? (eg, consistent water/nutrients, or cyclical?).
The best wine comes from mature grapes suffering through a dry spell.