There are plenty of arguments on each side of the "plastic vs. wood" debate in the context of sailing ship models. I've done a fair amount of work in both; I enjoy working with both, and in my opinion each has plenty of advantages.
But the notion that wood is inherently a better material than plastic to represent a wood prototype just doesn't hold up to scrutiny or logic - especially when we're talking about kits. It's certainly true that some species of wood do a good job of representing real wood in miniature - but rarely, if ever, will you find those woods in a kit. Boxwood, pearwood, and holly (my own personal favorite for many purposes) are just too expensive for the kit manufacturers to consider. The American ones generally use basswood, which isn't bad stuff by any means. But it's fuzzy, soft, and not particularly receptive to stain and other finishes. The HECEPOB (that's Hideously Expensive Continental European Plank-On-Bulkhead) companies dote on woods like mahogany, walnut, and beach, most of which have grain so coarse that a scale sailor would trip over it. My rants against the HECEPOB companies have taken up more space in this Forum than anybody has a right to take; in the unlikely event that anybody's interested, a Forum search on HECEPOB will provide a great cure for insomnia. The bottom line is that a well-designed, well-molded, and well-painted plastic hull or deck can be made to look more like a miniaturized reall hull or deck than anything in a wood kit.
Fifty years ago plastic kit manufacturers (or at least one of them: Revell) apparently regarded the sailing ship as the best subject to demonstrate the real state of the art, and push the envelope of design and molding technology to its limits. And the medium does have the potential to produce spectacularly accurate and well-detailed replicas of sailing ships. The combination of the injection-molding process and the panograph machine, even as long ago as the late 1950s, was generating molded details that none of the wood kit manufacturers could match. The plastic molding process has the capability of producing finer detail than any modeler can by hand. (If you don't believe it, take a look at an LP phonograph record.) With the addition of modern computer-aided design and mold-making, the potential is there for some really superb sailing ship kits.
But JMart is right. The manufacturers aren't taking advantage of that technology, for one obvious, overwhelming reason: they've concluded that sailing ship kits don't sell. In other Forum threads we've argued over the question of whether the manufacturers are right on that point. My own opinion is - regretfully - that they probably are. Plastic kits require such an enormous investment in design, tooling, and marketing that they have to sell in the tens of thousands in order for the manufacturer to make money. Are tens of thousands of modelers out there waiting with bated breath for a new plastic sailing ship kit? I'd like to think so, but in all honesty I doubt it.
In any case, I'm not enough of an evangelist for the cause of plastic sailing ship kits to suggest that styrene is the ideal medium for this sort of model. Plastic is great for some things, but not for others. It's great for making figureheads, more than acceptable for hulls and decks (especially if the manufacturer can figure out how to make those parts reasonably thick - like Imai used to do), and wretched for masts and yards. I've suggested before that the "ideal" sailing ship kit might be a multi-media production, with a cast resin hull, wood spars, and machined or cast metal or plastic fittings. A couple of enterprising manufacturers have made some hesitant efforts in that direction. I don't have the impression that any of those products has been a stunning success, market-wise, but I do think the potential is there.
In the mean time, we probably should be grateful for the kits we've got - even the "new" ones that, in fact, are forty or fifty years old. I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing the grand old Revell Flying Cloud again. Or the Airfix H.M.S. Prince, or the Revell yacht America, or the Airfix Revenge, or....