I haven't read the entire thread but it seems most of the posts are in favor of kits. Hmmmm... Well, if somebody had posted these thoughts in the ARF section there would be entirely different reactions. I love flying in general and come from a background of growing up around a dad that built mostly everything from scratch. He would spend countless hours building trains, planes, ships, submarines. He built a 4 1/2 ft. WW2 submarine that was remote control and could dive under water. I remember as a kid building lots of car models and building some airplane kits with my dad. My dad passed away a couple years and I was the one in the family fortunate enough to inherit most of the things that he had built that he still had. One of the things is a civil war cannon scenery of six horses, a soldier, the casson and cannon. He built the casson and cannon from scratch and it wasn't untill recently that I "fired off" the cannon. A load of blackpowder and a 5mm pellet is what it shoots. Lots of fun.
The thing is though is that times have changed so much. We didn't have computers, cell phones, and all the trappings of today. We had one TV in the home I grew up in and if we didn't like the show my dad was watching, we'd have to go do something else, like go build a model. Most of the kids I grew up with made some type of models but now a days there's hardly any kids out there that make models anymore or anything else for that matter. In the sixties most of the country was glued to the TV set watching the space missions but with the exception of the latest shuttle mission, most of them in the last dozen years had pretty much gone unnoticed. Everybodies time seems to go to other things these days. I did buy a kit recently and plan to build it when the rainy season sets in. Once I get it put together I'll have to muster up enough confidence to fly it after spending so much time building it. The previous kit that I built (4*40) made me so nervous to fly it that I sold it. Hopefully not with this one. One thing with ARFs is that if you pile it in you can order another one and it looks just like the one you crashed. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not........[:-]