Interesting question. Sounds like you're thinking along the right lines. The Rattlesnake, being a full-rigged ship, is a pretty ambitious subject for a first effort. On the other hand, she's a small ship and all the kits you've described are on a large scale; she doesn't involve a great deal of repetition, which discourages lots of newcomers.
I built the old solid-hull Model Shipways kit a long, long time ago - in the early '70s, I think. I remember it as a near-state-of-the-art kit for the era - and fantastically expensive for a college student's budget. The plans are by George Campbell, a fine artist and draftsman who did his homework and had a knack for making his drawings accurate, clear, and somehow friendly-looking. (I do remember one small and rather amusing goof in those drawings: Campbell left the jibs off the sail plan. I wrote to Model Shipways about that, and got back a courteous letter acknowledging the error. It would be quite simple to fix it.)
Solid-hull kits like that do have their drawbacks. As I remember, the Rattlesnake hull was solid up to the level of the quarterdeck and forecastle. (I may be wrong about this. My 53-year-old brain is having trouble remembering the kit.) In such a ship this is problematic because there's no solid, thwartships bulkhead under either of those decks. If the hull is left like that, the viewer of the finished model can easily see that there's a solid block of wood under there. You can chisel away the chunks in question, but that's quite a job.
Another problem is that a solid hull, as it comes from the manufacturer, is an amorphous blob with no reference points on it. There's no centerline; there's no positive way to drill the holes for the masts absolutely upright; etc. Not a big problem on a well-made solid hull - and MS made some of the best on the market.
One other consideration. Model Shipways used to be an independent company, run by two wonderful gents, John Shedd and Sam Milone, out of a tiny storefront on a dead end street in Bogota, New Jersey. They put a great deal of effort into making their kits accurate and buildable - and picking unusual subjects. They didn't have a great deal of money to put into materials. For many years they cast their fittings in lead alloy. Lead is notoriously unstable; it often suffers from "lead disease," a physical/chemical reaction that makes it degrade into a white powder. Lead disease is unpredictable. I've personally seen examples of ship fittings that, over a period of five or ten years, have "flowered" beyond recognition. I also have some old MS lead castings that have been knocking around my workshop for more than thirty years, and look good as new. If I were buying an old MS kit over the net I'd want to see the fittings, or a good photo of them, before I laid out any cash. (There are different opinions about how to handle lead fittings if you do get stuck with them. It's generally accepted that if you put your model in am airtight plexiglas case and let natural sunlight fall directly on it, the fittings will start to flower within months. If you prime and paint all the fittings carefully, make your case of glass, provide for a little air circulation inside it, and keep it under artificial light, the fittings will probably be ok - but no promises. Lead is unpredictable.)
In the late 1970s (I'm hazy about the dates) Model Shipways (largely due to competition from its biggest rival, Bluejacket) started making its fittings of Britannia metal, an alloy of tin and brass that's much more durable than lead. Shortly thereafter, John and Sam retired and sold the company to Model Expo. By that time the lead fittings were (I think) gone completely, and Model Expo has been using Britannia ever since. So if you get a solid-hull Rattlesnake, it may have lead fittings (a gamble) or Britannia ones (fine). I don't remember whether Model Expo ever sold solid-hull Rattlesnakes under its own label. If you find a solid-hull Rattlesnake with a Model Expo label, it presumably has Britannia fittings.
Shortly after acquiring Model Shipways, Model Expo started re-doing the old MS kits with plank-on-bulkhead hulls. The Rattlesnake, if I remember right, was one of the first subjects for that approach. I haven't had my hands on a Model Shipways/Model Expo Rattlesnake kit, but I suspect it's the best of the three routes to a nice model. One caveat: as I understand it, the kit includes some strange metal pieces that are intended to form "frames" for the gunports. In the photos of the finished product that I've seen, those pieces look kind of weird and out of scale. I wonder how difficult it would be to build the model without them.
I haven't seen the Mamoli kit in person either, but my observation has been that Mamoli is about like most of the other Continental European ship model manufacturers. Their kits are designed primarily for interior decorators, and unless extensively modified to not produce scale models. I have yet to see one of those kits that, in my judgment, was worth taking out of the hobby shop. That's a personal opinion, but it's shared by many other serious ship modelers who've been in the game for a while. (I've held forth on this subject several times before in this forum. In the unlikely event that you're interested, you might take a look at a thread from several months back that starts "First wooden ship model.")
One other thing that should be taken into consideration is the model builder's personal taste. A solid hull gets you started quicker and probably builds confidence initially, but does take lots of work. A well-designed plank-on-bulkhead kit certainly takes longer to build, but the problems I mentioned above - the open spaces under the quarterdeck and forecastle, and the lack of reference points lining things up - take care of themselves automatically. The early stages of work on a solid hull require some relatively brutal carpentry, to thin down the bulwarks with a chisel or gouge. Some people find that easy; others don't. Virtually all the work on a plank-on-bulkhead kit is '"finger work." There are scarcely any large pieces. Some folks do better with that sort of thing.
By now you probably wish you'd never asked the question. Sorry to go on at such awful length, but this is a favorite subject. I really like ships from the Revolutionary period, and I really enjoy reminiscing about the old days at Model Shipways.
Good luck. It's a great hobby.