Chris, DLG took a huge shot in the arm when plans for a very competitive design was made available to anyone and everyone free of charge.

It did help that the designer is an MIT professor in aeronautics and a very active aeromodeller. This gave the design a huge amount of credibility and a number of small cottage industries sprung up around this design making various bits and pieces and even whole planes. There would have been hundreds of these things built around the world.

While still a very competitive design, now the sport has become more widespread it's opened up the door for $1K fully molded DLG's with and their respective manufactures have resorted to secret airfoils, exotic construction and obscure materials to market their designs as "better than all others".

When was the last time anyone saw a real plan for a real F3A ship? In my case about 20 years ago for a Checkmate but I don't think that design had ever won anything inportant in Australia.