The greatest sense of satisfaction I ever had out of an ARF was when I tore down a Royal 40L, backed up the soft ply firewall with 3/16" birch ply, stripped the contact paper covering off, added ply reinforcements to the landing gear blocks, increased the rudder, elevator, aileron areas by 40 to 50%, glued the wing ribs to the spars and planking (including having to add filler strips to correct too wide slots), added a turtle deck with canopy, faired in the nose to match the spinner with a removeable nose block, got rid of the soft lg wire, and re-covered with good old American Monocoat. Had a faster, more manuverable aircraft, even though I added almost 6 ounces of weight.
Never overcame the fact that the two wing panels had two different airfoils, though. Had a fair amount of roll coupling with any control input. After fewer than 30 flights, found out the hard way I should have replaced the plastic control horns with good Dubro parts.

I'm kind of reminded how so many local drug stores, craft shops, and variety stores carried and sold huge amounts of plastic kits. Then came the easy to assemble snap together plastic kits. Now, where these stores used to have entire racks of models, now they might have only a couple shelves, or nothing at all.

I'm just wishing that I could get away from all the overtime I'm working and get back to building, kits and plans, and an occassional scratch build and only once in a while getting a distinctive ARF that strikes my fancy.

I notice there is still a lot of kit and scratch building going on in my area, especially amoung the large scale afficianados, even among the under 40 as with the over 50 group. Just that more of the entry level people are going with the ARFs. A few of those who stay in the sport for more than a couple of years seem to grow into building.

The drop-off in building is just another symptom of the National illness that over the last 20 or so years has taken us from respecting real work to considering only "Virtual" or "Mental/Supervisory/executive" work to have value, and anybody who gets his/her hands dirty or works up a sweat in anyplace but an excersize program as being somehow subhuman. When my wife came to this country 36 years ago, she was impressed with how much respect even manual labor got in this country. She doesn't see as much of it anymore. Work and working people are now starting to have the same treatment it got in her home country.