What bothers me about that nice old Revell "Treasury"-class kit is that the people who run Revell don't seem to understand what it is. The announcement of its latest incarnation, a couple of years or so ago, described the Taney as an active unit of the Coast Guard. (I can't quote the exact verbiage, because the kit seems to have disappeared from the Revell line - again. But I think the blurb read something like "She is currently stationed on the Atlantic Sea Frontier.") In fact, as everybody on this thread probably knows, the Taney was last decommissioned in 1986 and has been preserved as a museum ship in Baltimore Harbor for more than twenty-five years.
In other words, the management decided (for what obscure corporate reasons I have no idea) to reissue the kit without knowing anything about the real ship, and reused the advertising copy that had been written for an earlier re-release decades earlier.
I used the feedback option on the Revell website to send a comment on this - along with the observation that Revell was missing the boat in not promoting the kit as a replica of a ship people could actually visit. I did not, of course, get a response.
I see evidence all over the place that modern plastic kit companies - especially American ones - are run by people who know virtually nothing about either scale modeling or the subject matter their kits represent. Maybe I'm being a little over-charitable, but I strongly suspect the people at Revell have no idea what a ludicrous thing that "H.M.S. Beagle" kit is. Or how incredibly primitive that poor old Iowa-class fossil is - even by comparison to other Revell and Monogram versions of the same class. They just know it sells.
I find this disturbing. It's been a problem for quite a few years now, and it's a miserable commentary on the way the industry has evolved. The people who founded Revell, Monogram, Lindberg, etc. may not have had modern high-tech machinery, research sources, or computers at their disposal, but they demonstrated consistently that they understood the hobby (as it existed then) and were trying to advance it.
There is reason for hope, though. Take a look at the recent developments at Airfix. Or Zvezda. Or Eduard. Or Dragon. Or Wingnut Wings. Some people are making a genuine - and successful - effort to advance the quality and sophistication of the industry. But I'm afraid we're going to have to put up with deceptively-packaged kits from ancient molds for a long time - more specifically, for as long as the manufacturers think there's money to be made by selling them.
Youth, talent, hard work, and enthusiasm are no match for old age and treachery.