RE: Do we buy Arfs so we can rebuilld them befoe we fly them?
You actually pay less for most ARF's than what it would cost to buy the kit and th e covering... then the glue they used and a lot of the hardware they toss in with it is "free."
The Fokker Dr1 pictured in my Avitar cost $250 as an ARF... to buy a kit the same scale would have cost $150... then 4 rolls of monoKote minimum to cover it. There is no way I could have built it for the cost of the ARF. And the ARF was so good... I didn't even have to paint the firewall for fuelproofing. I found ONE bad glue joint in the whole thing. (30 sec to fix that...)
The Goldberg Tiger 60 ARF I just competed a couple of weeks ago had NO problems in its construction. I did recoat the firewall for added fuelproofing (because I couldn't tell what paint they used.... not because of lack of paint.) And I added some covering on the root ribs. Again... I could not have bought the kit and the covering for the cost of the prebuilt and precovered aircraft.
The same pattern can be seen in a lot of other ARFs of sport and trainer models costing in the range of $100 to $300 for the aircraft. (no engine or radio)
The current state of the ARF industry is really VERY good. A HUGE improvement over what they were passing off 10 to 15 years ago. (and most of the ones from 20 years ago were junk compared to 10 yeas ago's standards...)