We've had several interesting discussions of this kit here in the forum. I think it's safe to say that (1) it most emphaticaly does not represent the state of the art in plastic ship kits, and (2) it's of enormous importance in the history of the hobby.
It was in fact the first ship kit - and by some definitions the first scale model kit - produced by Revell. (The company name had appeared on a series of antique car kits and a batch of tiny "ships in bottles" a couple of years earlier, but those had originated with a company called Gowland. The Missouri molds were the first that originated with Revell. My source on all this is Dr. Thomas Graham's fine book, Remembering Revell Model Kits.)
The kit initially appeared in 1953. I haven't actually compared the parts to a set of accurate plans, but I suspect the kit's accuracy is marginal in just about every dimension. (The U.S. Navy did publish, late in the war or shortly after it ended, a series of simplified ship plans prepared specifically for model builders. I imagine the kit was based on those, or maybe on the Edward Wiswesser plans that, I believe, were appearing at about that time.) The earlier comment in this thread about the inaccuracy of the underwater hull shape is certainly on target. In 1953 the hull lines of the Iowa class (and most other Navy ships that had been launched after the war started) were still classified. (The official plans the Navy sold to model builders, if I remember right, only showed the above-water shapes.)
There's room for argument about what the first plastic warship kit was; the strongest contender for the title may be the Varney Gato-class submarine (a revised version of which is still being sold under the Lindberg label). But the Revell Missouri certainly was among the very first. That being the case, the designers had no precedents to guide them. Injection molding was a relatively new process, and nobody knew what the market for such kits would be like. (Would it be practical to mold the 20mm guns as individual pieces? If so, would the average purchaser be able or willing to glue them all in place? Would the purchaser rather have guardrails represented by heavy plastic "walls," or omitted altogether? For that matter, just who was the average purchaser - and how old was he? Was he an 8-year-old kid? A high school student? A 35-year-old Navy veteran?) The only competition was in the form of wood kits (sometimes with metal detail castings), that were produced by companies like Monogram.
The decision makers at Revell apparently guessed right; the kit was a big hit with the public. A year later Revell released a modified version with an electric motor, and a year after that came the company's first venture in selling one kit as two ships, with the release of the U.S.S. New Jersey. (That one was slightly modified: it had helicopters rather than float planes. It also contained instructions and box art depicting the ship in the experimental dazzle paint scheme that the Missouri wore while she was on trials - and that the New Jersey never wore.) By the end of 1955 the Revell ship line was off and running, with a Baltimore-class heavy cruiser, a Fletcher-class destroyer, a PT boat, a Midway-class carrier, the liner United States, a Chris Craft flying bridge cruiser, and a totally fictionalized representation of the submarine Nautilus. (All the features of that one were classified; the Revell designers just guessed at what she might look like.)
The second edition of Dr. Graham's book (the one I have) covers the history of Revell through 1979. By that time the old Missouri kit had been reissued six times, under the names of all four members of the class (Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin). I suspect it's reappeared at least that many times since then.
In all honesty I have extremely mixed emotions about it. As a scale model it's hard to take seriously. (Comparing it to, for instance, the recent Tamiya 1/700 version is like looking at inhabitants of two different planets.) And I really question the ethics of promoting it every few years as a "new release." (Revell now apparently has access to the molds that originally were made by Monogram and Aurora. If Revell wants an Iowa-class battleship in its range, it has, by my count, at least four others to choose from - all of them better-detailed and more accurate than the old 1/535 version.) On the other hand, as a specimen of what plastic modeling was like fifty years ago it's a fascinating museum piece. And for us Old Phogies who can remember those days, it's a wonderful exercise in nostalgia. I still remember heaing up a kitchen knife on the stove to flare over the ends of the mounting pins on all those gun mounts; if you did it right, the 16", 5", and 40mm guns all would rotate - along with the aircraft catapults. And the model would rattle noisily when you shook it. AND it would float in the bathtub.