ORIGINAL: valleyk
Maybe Stereolithography will make balsa-bass wood scale kits that take two years to complete obsolete.
It isn't the building that takes two years, it's the detailing!
Just imagine you order a 1/3 scale Sopwith Camel all framed up by a computer using a supper strong light weight plastic or composite material. All you need to do is cover, rigging engine and radio installation and of course painting your favorite color scheme.
The color schemes will come prepacked as "skins" (including rivets and panel lines) that you can just print out and apply to your model.
Seriously though, I think we are going to see more and more 3-D printing (both home-based and through services) creeping into scale modeling. This is a good thing in the sense that a company can keep hundreds of 3D models on file ready to print, but maybe only a few dozen molds. But it will also be a sad day when scale modeling is reduced to "press print."