The sad truth, I'm afraid, is that the manufacturers regard sailing ships as a tiny, obscure corner of the plastic kit market and just regard it as a means of making money off people who don't really know much about the subject. (The experts and knowledgeable critics who buy aircraft, armor, and modern warship kits don't have much of a counterpart in the plastic sailing ship world - such as it is. If a company released a model airplane kit on the level of accuracy of the Heller Soleil Royal or the Revell Beagle, the criticisms would flood cyberspace and the magazines.) The only plastic model company that seems to have really taken the sailing ship seriously as a product for serious scale modelers was Imai, which went bust almost thirty years ago.
So many kits are sailing around with false identities out there that I, for one, can't keep up with them. With the help of Dr. Thomas Graham's book on the history of Revell, I could probably put together a list of the Revell USA sailing ship kits and the deceptive labels that have been put on them. (Revell USA didn't actually issue many sailing ship kits - and issued its last one, the excellent Viking ship, more than thirty years ago.) But when we get beyond that, I fall off the bus. (Revell Germany, for instance, has released several sailing ship kits that, to my knowledge, have never turned up in US boxes. I actually saw the ancient Aurora Chinese junk kit in a Revell Germany box once.) The ancient Pyro kits have appeared under the banners of so many manufacturers, and under so many names, that one can get a headache just thinking about them. And Heller has pulled this stunt so many times that I can't begin to sort all of its kits out.
I do want to put in a favorable plug for one manufacturer: Airfix. The relatively small line of Airfix sailing ships has always been close to the state of the art at the time of release. (Ok, the earlier ones don't come up to today's standards, but they're not bad - and they look like the ships they're supposed to represent.) The kits have consistently improved over the years. (The one exception I'm aware of: the Airfix Bounty, which was a step backward. It appeared at a time when the company's financial problems were really serious.) And so far as I know, Airfix has never recycled a sailing ship kit by claiming it was something that it wasn't. Now that the company has had some new life breathed into it, maybe - just maybe - we'll see a new sailing ship kit from it. That I'd certainly welcome. Long live Airfix.
Youth, talent, hard work, and enthusiasm are no match for old age and treachery.