I am not so sure about the super glue for this application, at least not the pure stuff.
Unlike many other glues, super glue (cyanoacrylate) normally works best on two matched surfaces, very smooth surfaces, or surfaces that make intimate contact over large areas It does not work well when there are large gaps to be filled. Does not always work, or work well, on rough surfaces.... Hence, it works on flat glass to flat glass, skin against skin etc. Wood is porous and so normally one wants a glue that will fill the holes and bond via mechanical gripping to the holes. Even things like epoxy does not stick well to very smooth surfaces but at least the material itself it somewhat strong. But works to hole metal to wood if the metal is first made rough. Hence, white glue, yellow glue, etc works well for wood to wood etc.
If you really want to try super glue, I would get one of the gels. These have stuff in them and are not a pure cyanoacrylate (super glue), but more rubbery like an epoxy.
Wood and brass are two very different types of materials and makes the bonding a difficult problem. Keeping the brass out of the wood when polishing is a separate issue, where the wood holes need to be filled with something acceptable, (transparent, hard, etc) prior to the brass getting into them.
@
dbb-the-bruce
Your first passes look pretty nice. I suppose if you wanted to really give them your hard environmental test you mentioned, you could temperature cycle them in an oven/freezer. (When I purchased my current house my wife wanted new appliances and so I kept the old oven and installed in in the basement. I some times use it for such experiments.) Temperature cycling would cause the metal to expand contract but once the water is out of the wood head has less effect. However, water is what really makes the wood expand and contract. Keeping the water out is the key. I am not advocating that you do it, but steaming the wood, then drying it would be a harsh test. No mater what you do, these accelerated tests only go so far in predicting the normal cycle behavior. By the way, I am not for sure what your lacquer is made from as there are so many synthetic materials any more, many of which are somewhat soluble in water due to the EPA rules, exspecially paints. Old fashioned stuff was soluble in alcohols, but not water.
By the way, I recently needed a thinner sheet of Aluminum than I had on hand. I only cared about one surface looking nice. It was for a instrument panel and its final thickness needed to sort of match the rest of the panel. So after cutting all of the holes in it that I needed. I milled off about a third of the thickness of the entire sheet of material to get it down to about 0.070. I did this on a backer board with clamping around the edges. However, when I got it out the stresses from the surface cutting were so bad that the sheet was warped like a potato chip. Over a length of about 10inches it was bent about 3 -4 inches. Not to give up, I decided to try to relieve the stress. I clamped the sheet between two sheets of 3/8" steel plate with c-clamps. I then put it into the oven at about as high a temperature that it would go to ~500F and heated it for a couple of hours and then let it cool to where I could handle it. Afterwards it was pretty flat. Flat enough for me to use.
Good luck.
Dave