I think it is best for a begginer to go with an ARF trainer. My old Avistar trainer last year was very tough, straight, pretty light at 5.25lbs with an OS46SF, stood up to my terribly hard and fast early landings and flew very well in every imaginable way. The covering was very good and easy to see. The assembly was painless - later I built one for someone else in two lazy days.
Compare that to taking a few months in bulding a kit. Then learning to cover at the same time, which can be royal pain in the ass. And please keep in mind that while you may be able able to build a kit in week that doesn't mean a complete newbie can or even wants to. It can be a daunting task. Plus this hobby is not like scale plastic modeling where the actual building process is the entire hobby. Flying is the point of it in the end, not just building. I don't know if any of you ever do plastic models but would you consider it a cheapening of the hobby if a new modeler chose to build a simple cheap kit straight out of the box without using all the available resin and PE detail sets and painted the camo on his FW190 by hand instead of a Pasche dual action airbrush?
I was briefly involved with the hobby in 1995, and back then ARFs were utterly terrible. They were heavy, used plastic moldings for turtledecks, cowls, pants, wingtips, stabtips, had the foam backed sticky covering and were usually ugly as sin.
But that was 7 years ago.
Now any good ARF has a painted glass cowl, pants, is all wood, covered in Monokote/Ultracote, they are pretty light, built straight etc. All in all much much better.
And it is in no way the fault of an ARF if some guy isn't careful enough to glue the wing at all, why would you trust him to build a kit. What would he not glue together there? I have never seen ARF instruction book where they do not clearly point out to use large amounts of 30 minute epoxy on the wing joint.
ARFs are fine, well most are, except that nasty evil WM T34....
Right Gordon?
Filip