I've been building Guillow's kits all my life, I fondly remember building a little cessna that flew exactly the way it was supposed to, had varied results with other birds. They are not exactly consistant in quality, so those of you that have been turned off by one, have not experienced one of their's that was higher quality.
I made a suggestion to the LHS to pull the shrink wrap off of the boxes to let us see what we are getting contents wise and to check out the quality, I recently picked up a Cessna 172, 34" kit and was floored with the quality and the fact, it's begging for eflight conversion, they already planned in the control surfaces, I have a Javelin kit that is physically impossible to use the stock die cuts since they are so faint, nobody can possibly use the stock for anything. I bought the kit for the plans, of which I enlarged 200% and converted to e-flight. And, going back to my early days, I picked up another Guillow's 108 I blew up the plans on to make it into an rc bird, I may still use the original kit and make it a free flight bird that will get launched from the rc version.
The 34" stuka came out pretty good and wasn't too hard of an eflight conversion, shown, and the current one ready to maiden, SAE5 was much more difficult to convert to eflight due to it's size in spite of the fact it was a lazer cut kit, the build log is
http://www.wattflyer.com/forums/show...ewpost&t=19016 I still have mroe details to add to it, but it's ready to take to the air now.
Overall, when you get past the 10-15.00 kits, the quality goes up and it's good practice since you are literally making a scale type of build as per the full size bird. As for covering, I don't do paper any more, I prefer ultracoat or solite.
Also, the Lancer kit I built, no photo's, was not the best in quality, so good job on your's, and even better that you got it flying correctly.