Hi,
I'm just getting tired of the 'they all have problems' adage because it's just not true. At least not to the degree that people who sling that around are trying to pretend. I used the now-extinct Y/A ARF as an example, but nobody ever had to cut into an enclosed structure to repair anything on one. I'm not aware of a single incident. In the 15 years I've been involved with the company, I'm aware of two issues with ARFs. One was an anti-rotation pin in an F-15 stab that somehow was drilled crooked, leaving the stab deflected when the arms were at neutral. The other was on an ARF F-18 single where the stab servo mount was glued too low, leaving the top only attached by a bead of cavasill (sp?) and the mount broke off in flight.
What we DIDN'T have was planes with inadequate adhesion between the wins and skins or design/engineering flaws that rendered a plane basically unsafe to fly at all. We never had control surfaces that would wiggle after a few flights because there was next-to-no structure to brace the stab against torque. We never had the classic FEJ thing where two necessary objects were designed to occupy the same space at the same time (like a stab servo designed to be in the exact same place as the vertical fin spar or main gear that retract into bypass). We never had a customer scratching his head and realizing that we apparently never tried to assemble one of these things ourselves before we started shipping them out. Best of all, we never took peoples' money and then waited months (if ever) to deliver [hopefully all of] the product. So, it's not fair or accurate to broad-brush with the whole, "Hey, they all have issues" adage. A little bit of overspray on a canopy is a different issue than a full-flying stab that is going to absolutely, positively fail if you fly it.