We are just going through a period of change.. many older modellers are hanging up their tools. For many years it has been very rare to see a scratch built plane especially one that has not been modelled before.
I agree with many who have commented that youngsters just spend more and more time on their phones and social media taking endless photos of each other, mostly themselves. Some seem to be plugged in all the time. Not sure how they manage it with the battery life bing so short though!

I like to compare it with clock making

Our Grandfathers made clocks
Our fathers knew how to repair them
Our generation just buy a new one when the old one fails
Our children cannot be bothered to wind them or fit new batteries
Their children do not know what clocks are as they only use the mobile to tell the time.

I found this video that shows the bygone age of making them at the Elgin watch making factory. Well worth a look as few films of manufacturing in early industry survive. The factory ran for 100 years being demolished in the 1960's. It employed huge numbers of very skilled people as can be seen at the beginning and end of the film. Technology changed of course to making quartz movements and now the use of mobiles. Change in the last 50 years has been amazing. Very difficult for a manufacturer to keep up. This was an age when man was at his most advanced making very complex machines to speed making complex parts. Have a look at the machine making screws at 12:35.

We should not be too upset by change in the modelling world. I had a childhood away from TV and telephones and learned how to make things with my hands as I had plenty of time available. At our school we had a modelling club for use when we had spare time. By 10 those who wanted to could make balsa and tissue models to launch off the model club steps and we were not supervised at all by teachers. A few years later and we built control line models and were flying combat planes. Our children are in an ever connected world and cannot see the point and certainly do not get the same excitement of making a plane from scratch or even better designing and making one from scratch. I always think it is a thing of wonder that it is possible to make a scratch built model of a plane that has never flown before and manage to get it successfully into the air. It is this that drove me to make my jet models. We never called ourselves engineers and we just learned mostly by trial and error. I love to make things and it is possible to design and make our small jet engines from scratch in our own workshops. I guess that the modern generation will start now from having designed and proved it works on the computer first.

Recently I have been renovating old lathes and have bought a 70 year old superb US made Rivett lathe. Sad thing is that scraping is now almost a lost art. 50 years ago it was possible to find someone to do the work. It is nigh on impossible now and it is even difficult to find anyone that can regrind beds. The throw away society has reached machine tools now. Everyone I spoke to was about to retire and there is no-one coming on too replace them. Hand scraping is hard physical work and not easy to learn, though there are now plenty of Youtube videos available.

John