I have to agree with you Rob. I really miss the old Pactra liquid glue. It worked slowly enough that one had time to put the parts together before the glue evapourated. Testors can probably do it but the stuff always makes me ill. Now I'm using Plasticweld and sometimes I'm not as fast as it is. OTOH, every so often I crack open a really old Humbrol tin and the aroma takes me way back. That gets to be a rarer event as time goes on.
The kits: Well for one thing there is plenty of interior detail. The first few kits I built had essentially hollow fuselages that one could look through. Pilots were either little bumps moulded on a flat plane where the cockpit was supposed to be or they were stuck on pegs coming out from the inside of the fuselage where one could see them floating in a void under the canopy.
References are far more satisfactory - and not, at the same time. We've come to expect that we'll find what we need when once we didn't know what we needed, or that we needed it. I can recall when I started building 'seriously' back in junior high and all I had to go on was the books in the school library which were illustrated chiefly with publicity photos from the DOD. It wasn't until 1967 and my discovery of a copy of "Scale Modeler" that I found out there were others with the same afflictions. Prior to that I figured I was the only non-kid building model planes and certainly the only crazy one in this locality.
The abundance of resin detail parts seems to have made doing them yourselves obsolete. I guess this makes a super-detailled model more easily attained but to me the building is the fun. It's part of the trip, the end of which is the finished model. Unfortunately, I have way too many unfinshed trips here. ;]
Bill Banaszak, MFE