No, that's cutting a cowl. You're not shaping anything there - - you're trying to make cutouts that are precise as possible. When I think of shaping, I think of sanding a leading edge, creating a rounded nose from a block of balsa, ect. That isn't done with too many ARFs. When it comes to covering, you're talking about touch-up skills for ARFs, not cutting, fitting, and applying covering from a roll. Again, they're very different skills.

You're trying to apply broad terms to very specific skills. Of the kits that I've had that come with hardware, the hardware has usually been of a quality that is acceptable to me. That's especially true with today's kits, which are generally sold with high-quality hardware or no hardware. ARFs have a much, much broader range of hardware included.

Inspecting as you build is far different from inspecting an ARF. As you build, you have access to each area. You're doing the work yourself, and have control over the process. With an ARF, you're looking at just what you can see or feel. That's rather different. Same with deciding what to reinforce. You don't have a set of plans to look at and evaluate. You can't make structural changes in the same way as you can with a kit. And no, I've never recovered an ARF due to color preference. Crash damage, sure. But repairing ARFs is also different from repairing a model you've built yourself.

I'm not sure why you would put forth so much effort to try and say that the skills involved are the same. They plainly are not, unless a person is talking in such broad terms as to make the skills used in model making also apply to such things as plumbing and car repair. The devil is in the details, as always. Here, the details are very different. Different techniques, different skills, and different reasons for all of it.