Only he can say for sure, but there certainly are a wide range of different qualities of maple. I have noticed Korean-made basses having necks made of a pale white "maple" with a very straight-line grain, and they seem light in weight. Perhaps he was referring to whatever wood is used as maple in those Korean instruments.
My understanding (or at least a vague impression) is that harder maple is denser and better in certain applications (it was actually the quality of DB bridges I was reading about at the time). Maybe he's implying that the maple in this bass is good stuff, but overall the bass is still a reasonably comfortable weight?
In regard to the body maple, i briefly owned an early 90s neck thru Streamer with much less dense maple..also i have seen a few of these "light maple" bodies over the years, and found the overall response of these to not be as good, in my experience. Warwick seems to have better success with the overall punchy sound when they stick to dense woods> Your results may vary.
Warwick seems to taut using dense, toneful woods, so I guess it makes sense.
