Discussion The Cost of Kit vs Scratch Build: A Real Divide or Just Perspective?

[Korsan]

After reading your detailed so what interpretation thread i lose interest for further building of modelships.I think instead repeating errors of the static models ,one should build functional models like rc models (vehicles planes etc)
In this case you can be sure with or without error

 

[Bob Cleek]

I am not defending the designer I am defending the category of "hobby kit" that has no rules just the goal to make money off the kit. It does not matter how refined a kit is or if a builder builds from a kit or scratch. A hobby kit by any other name is still a hobby kit at the bottom of the categories. So you can not apply real world sailing or naval architecture rules and standards to a hobby kit that has no real world function other than a past time hobby.

It may bug the crap out of you that an error continues, and it bugs others Hahn took artistic liberties but at the end of the day it is just a big so what!

The error really doesn't bug me at all. I don't build kits anymore and don't ever plan to. I don't even have any investment in whether the designer acknowledged his error or not, although that factors into my assessment of his intellectual integrity, if not his technical skill as a modeler. I agree completely with your analysis above. What steams my clams, though, is an entire industry that has created and encouraged a "hobby" of building kits based on the premise that their products create models that are at the top "of the categories," rather than at the bottom, as you note. This is a misrepresentation that is understandably embraced by their customers, as well. The only reasons I object to that at all, and truly outside of these reasons I couldn't care less, is because the perception of the expensive kit model being the equivalent of the upper echelons of ship modeling creates an artificial barrier beyond which many otherwise excellent modelers will ever rise and the proliferation of completed kit models devalues the work of scratch builders in the eyes of the marketplace. The hobbyist who completes paint-by-numbers pictures will never be an artist if they believe advertising hype that tells them buying that paint-by-numbers kit will make them an "oil painting artist." I expect real fine artists feel the same about paint-by-numbers kits as many scratch modelers feel about ship model kits... they couldn't care less, but how many paint-by-numbers hobbyists might have gone on to far greater accomplishments if they hadn't been allowed to rationalize striving for nothing more than their next paint-by-numbers kit.