Scratch building from plans or scratch building from plans you drew. It really doesn't matter considering the differences of that vs assembling a few pieces of an ARF.

I agree with NCIS in that I always do some changing to my way of building the kits. I never build them 100% per plans.

I know that the fiberglass and plastic cowls. canopies, etc on ARFs are not always good quality. To be honest, all I've seen is junk myself. If you want to talk about cheap linkage parts, that would be ARFs.