Dave Platt, one of the best RC Scale Modelers most important rule is Scoff while the Scoffing is good. The big push from China for ARF (almost ready to fly, no building, covering or painting required for the most part) is killing the builders market, so you gotta get everything you can when you can.
ARF's are the bane of my existence honestly Njaco. Its actually killing the hobby as I know it.
As time goes on fewer and fewer people build, they all want to rush out buy something Monday and fly it on Saturday.
You should see the poor excuses for "scale" the ARF guys have. A major ARF company released a Fw 190 that looked horrible, when I commented on its errors I was actually chastised by the manufacturer himself saying he did two years of research designing the plane and used real FW drawings to do so. I posted a side shot of the EXACT plane he was attempting to copy and then dug into the details.
More or less people said that they just want something to LOOK like the plane, not be a scale copy.
I sometimes watch medival type movies (Braveheart, etc) and wonder if this lazy, self-gratification, remote-control holding, drive-thru society would even function then. Me included.
Ive Met Dave Platt at the WRAM show last year and have a good portion of his CD's. He's a great guy with that British sense of Humor! I also started Building his Focke Wulf a long TIme ago but sold it when I thought I was out of the hobby, sorry I did now that I'm back into it !
I too find very sad to see people getting lazy, not only on modeling, RC, but in other fields also (and hobbies going astray).
But we can promote all this great things with the youngsters, never mind they are hooked on video games... in fact, it can be a promotional tool. I'm doing it with my 8 year-old, so far so good.
Anyway, Evil, my wife shares same feeling about my hobby just like yours. I think that's priceless.
And those first parts of your model... they sure look familiar with my paper model diagrams and patterns.
Oh, and talking about "not-buying-another-kit-'till-I-finish-this" syndrome... who doesn't have that? But, no matter how hard... credit card always goes first.