While I frankly prefer planes I built myself, I have no quarrel with people who prefer ARFs and RTFs. In my almost 60 years in this hobby/sport, I've seen a lot of very lousy ARFs come and go, compared to SOME that are on today's market. The best ARFs I ever had were kits or scratch built planes others started on and lost interest in and either gave or sold to me. I've also seen some family teams where one person loves to build, and the other sibling or even mate only likes to fly. Great for them. Some like to build, some like to fly, and some of us like to do both. There's room for everybody.

I've purchased and assembled a moderate number of ARFs and RTFs, and go back to building my own. But that's me. I started cutting out printwood with split double edge Blue Blades and gluing parts together with LePages household cement. I have built from piles of balsa with no plans at all, from plans that I scaled up from magazine articles, from plans, from many different levels of kits, assembled ARFs, and even turned some marginal ARFs into decent moderately durable planes. With over 140 kits and 30 pounds of balsa in my house, I am still curious to try a Goldberg Skylark ARF and a couple of the newer CL ARFs.

Also, thanks to the increasing availability of decent or even good ARFs, our club has enough members to support a very comfortable well maintained flying field. Sometimes you have to put up with a minor bad to get a lot of good. And it appears that with the increasing market for ARFs, the quality is gooing up. Too bad that with the growth of the ARF market, kits are being shoved to the side. I don't think it's a shortage of builders, just that we are becoming smaller in proportion to the overall market

By the way, scientifically speaking, birds developed from reptiles. Reptiles are egg layers. Therefore, the egg came before the chicken.