Thanks to all for the compliments.
The entire build including the carb intacts was OOTB. Italeri includes a thick sheet of stainless steel photo etch, challenging to work with but provides nice additional detail without having to spend extra $ on an Eduards set.
The biggest assembly pains besides my canopy screw-up was the need to install the landing gear assemblies before painting, the fiddly fit of the bomb bay doors and the need to cut out side window openings along both fuselage sides. The heavy panel lines didnt seem like a big deal to me due to the dark tone nature of the camo and black. Paints used we’re Tamiya fine light grey spray primer, Tamiya XF-1 flat black pre-shading, Tamiya XF-58 olive green for the dark green, XF-52 + XF-64 1:1 for the earth and XF-18 semi-gloss, sealed with Future. Panel line highlighting done using lamp black oil washes in mineral spirits. Kit decals were used (pretty good or Italeri) before applying a final coat of Testors Dullcote.
This kit is a good example of one where you should buy two, one to “dry-run” build to learn the idiosyncrasies before building the “final run” to avoid all the heartaches.
John