I've never seen an ARF scale model that even comes close to most of the kit or scratch built models I've seen. No "Scale" ARF currently available would deserve a place on the displays at Toledo. Many of these "Scale" ARFs, except MAYBE some of the ARFs being built by Top Flight and Goldberg from their kits, are more on the order of Stand Way Off Scale. Some of them are even Cartoon or Caricature scale. Then theres some so-called Scale ARFsthat seem to fall into the category of "The designer never saw the real thing, or bothered to use any scale three views or other documentation.
Properly designed and built ARFs and ARCs do have a place in our Hobby/Sport. They bring in a lot of people every year. The quality issues and construction weaknesses seem to turn off a lot of the new people after a short time as well. Just as it seems do the quick fly underpowered electric powered plastic "RC model airplanes" that show up on net sources and toy store/discount house shelves.
There's a lot more quality ARFs on the market than there were 25 or 30 years ago. Some of the old poorly built trash is still out there, too.
And ARFs are not the latest and greatest, either. There were cheap wire frame silk covered rubber powered Free Flight models on the market before WW2. Their problems were usually the same as the worst of today's ARFs, too. My first powered CL plane was a piece of plastic with an engine that only ran ionce, several years after I got the plane as a Christmas present.