When was the last time you built a kit and literally followed the instructions as written: assembly order, painting call-outs for each step, etc.?
I always spend a lot of time studying the instructions before starting a kit, but seldom follow them exactly. To paraphrase Capt. Jack Sparrow:, "they're more 'guidelines' than actual rules".
The thing that got me thinking about it was looking at the instructions for my new Academy F-4B. They have you attach the main landing gear to the wheel well walls and then trap that assembly between the top & bottom wing halves. To me that's a recipe for disaster.
And not just to pick on Academy, because I can also think of several other impractical assembly sequences I've seen on kit instruction sheets. For example, the Hasegawa Tomcats that have you mount the nose landing gear before assembling the forward fuselage to the wings and rear fuselage.
Unless there's some overwhelming reason not to, I almost always will leave stuff like the landing gear, antennas, weapons, canopies, etc off a plane until it's assembled, painted & decaled. Besides the risk of someone clumsy like me breaking stuff off, it makes it almost impossible mask and paint any type of multi-color paint scheme with all the little bits sticking out.
Most of us experienced modelers have figured things out, but I have to wonder how many newcomers to the hobby might get frustrated by trying to follow the instructions verbatim out of the box?
Mark