RE: How are ARF's made?
That's why we call them BARFs.
And that will be the day that any BARF has the same structural integrity of my builds. Take one apart. Look at all the poor fits where peices don't even touch, like spars in ribs and sheeting on bulkeads. They just slap them together with that crappy hot melt glue.
Naturally they build on jigs and modelers do not generally make jigs for every phase of construction. They are building many copies so jigs speed things up. When I laser cut 12 SE5s and assembled them, I had first made jigs and tooling for every phase of construction, including drilling special holes for landing gears, etc. Man, did the builds go fast! The time went into the tooling.
Those BARFs are built to a price point and nothing else. That's why you get poor wood selection, minimalist structures with sometimes too few pieces and so forth. The workers just follow an assemnbly sequence. I agree. They lack an understanding of what the requirements of the components are.
The hobby is going from modelers to o[perators so that and profit is why BARFs are such a big thing. It also enlarges the marketplace by getting many more people involved. The more comlicated, involved and demanding of skill and knowledge, the fewer participants you have. Every one of those things becomes a roadblock to $ale$.