One of the big differences between those expensive models and the foamy's is the additional attention to detail,many high performance planes have foam cores wings reinforced with carbon spares and covered using a variety methods and materials that take them to another performance level.I have a number of molded ships and aside from a custom paint job there is little that can be done to tweek the airframe its' already optimized but the foamy leaves room to explore my own personal path to optimize it in and learn as i go which in some ways is a whole lot of fun.I think that these foam planes generate high energy conversation and pure excitement among all the posters than I see in other threads were folks flying high end models. Sorry for being long winded, just my thoughts. Woody(blanik)