It sounds to me as though the person who bought this kit would be someone who had a foot in the scratch builder camp and a foot in the ARF camp.

Allow me to expand - it would be someone with the demands and attention to detail of the most experienced plans builders (I don't think it would really apply to the average kit builder) but someone with cash to flash but doesn't have the patience or inclination to do much of the work himself. I'm not convinced that a large enough catchment of such people exist to make up a viable market.

I myself build big expensive models from plans, so I can spread the costs. I spend as much as anyone else in the end, but I don't like parting with hundreds of (insert local currency here) at a time - it's only a hobby afterall. I do sometimes buy kits though, but they're usually cheap ones of sport models or accurate scale models which leave much of the work to the builder thus keeping costs down. As an example of such a scale kit, I have an Airsail DHC-1 Chipmunk kit I'm working on amongst other things.

I don't know of many people who are fussy enough to be prepared to pay such a premium for something they still have to build themselves who wouldn't want to change something about the kit. I think the only ones I ever built straight out of the box were my first trainers.

As I see it, anyone who wants to build does so for the personal touch and satisfaction. They are bound to make little changes here and there to improve scale accuracy, or practicality, or because they don't like a design feature or whatever.

I don't really envisage much of a market for very expensive kits including someone else's favourite hardware and construction/field assembly techniques.

I would expect (but may be wrong) that people would either prefer to just buy a good quality ARF if they didn't want to do the work themselves, or, if the "I built that" factor was more important they'd prefer to do it all themselves from scratch or based upon reasonable kits which offer a decent basis at reasonable cost and which do not require huge amounts of rework (in which case they'd go back to plan A and start from scratch to get it right first time).