RE: Ribs for tapered wings
Here's what I do. I have some scraps of plastic laminate... formica if you want to call it that. I lay out the tip rib and the root rib on two pieces of this laminate. I then use sheet metal shears to 'rough' in the shape a bit and then go to my sander and sand them down to as perfect as I can make them. Rough cut your rib material oversize.
Cut out any spar notches in the laminate parts which will help with aligning tip to root. Stack and align the tip and root patterns and drill a couple of alignment holes through them so you can clamp or pin the balsa in place.
Now... the KEY to getting it right. Start at the root, (assuming the wing tapers to a smaller tip) and stack it all together. But, start your stack with the root rib, then the template, then all the rest of the ribs and then the tip template. Pin the whole group together. Clamp it in a vise and sand it down with your sanding block just until you hear it touch down on the laminate. It is a pretty loud difference. You can use a saw to cross cut down for your spar notches and clean out the bottoms after unclamping them all with an exacto.
Why have the root rib outside of the template? Well, doing it this way leaves a fairly large angle on the tops of the ribs. Once you assemble the ribs to the spars, you'll need to sand it all down flat before doing any sheeting as the angles are just too great to get good glue joints. This reduction in size will make the root rib too small to match up to the tip rib of an inner section to a wing... (yes, please don't ask me how I know this but I really should just destroy that one wing outer and not be reminded anymore).
You can do this faster than laying out and cutting/sizing each rib from plans. Having the whole group clamped together, lets you heavy hand it a bit instead of having to be so careful with individual pieces. To me, then only easier method would be if I owned a lazer cutter... and only then would I resort to CAD/CAM.