Oh, dear. We've talked about this topic before in this forum, and I suspect regular participants are sick of reading my rantings about it. But I'll try to summarize my thoughts on the subject as briefly as I can.
First some caveats. I can't claim for an instant to have looked at every Continental European plank-on-bulkhead kit. Or even a sample from every manufacturer. I'm sure they vary in quality, and I'm sure the products of an individual company vary from one another. There may be some good Continental plank-on-bulkhead kits out there. But I have yet to see one that I'd consider worth taking home from the hobby shop.
The other point I want to emphasize in the beginning is that I'm not alone in my opinions. They're shared by a considerable number of other modelers who've been in the sailing ship game for a while. If my views seem strong, take a look at those of the late Charlie McDonald, former editor of the Nautical Research Journal. He wrote an article called "Piracy on the High C's: Those Much-Too-Expensive European Kits." It's on the Nautical Research Guild website.
My perception is that those manufacturers in general have some agenda other than scale modeling. They produce kits that only vaguely resemble real ships. The construction methods they employ frequently bear no resemblance to reality. (That double-planking system so many of them brag about, for instance, is utterly non-prototypical. It's designed to compensate for the fact that they haven't bothered to space the bulkheads carefully enough to support planks of scale dimensions.) The woods they supply are, in many cases, the sort that serious scale modelers reject, for the simple reason that they don't look like scale wood. (Mahogany, for instance, is a terrible wood for scale modeling. The grain is so coarse that a scale person would trip over it.) And why on earth would anybody make a deck of a sailing vessel out of a sheet of plywood? The surface of a deck, with rare exceptions, is a compound curve. It bulges upward in the center (camber) and curves vertically fore-and-aft (sheer). To force a piece of plywood into a compound curve is at best extremely difficult - and utterly pointless. Scratchbuilders quickly figure out that the easiest way to build a deck - not just the most accurate, but the EASIEST - is to lay it in the form of narrow planks.
The fittings in those kits, like so many other aspects of them, vary widely in quality, but most of the ones I've seen are pretty awful. They seem to have been designed by somebody interested in making things that look pretty, rather than scale reproductions. Many, for instance, boast about their "metalized" or "bronzed" fittings, as though that had something to do with scale fidelity. I even recall seeing one that bragged about the "stained glass" in the transom windows. (I have yet to hear of an actual ship with stained glass windows.)
I had an interesting experience once regarding such fittings. I walked into a hobby shop just as the proprietor was showing a customer the latest arrival: a pair of extremely expensive cast bronze (supposedly; I suspect they were plated white metal) trailboards for the Cutty Sark. I meekly suggested that the proportions of them were badly distorted (they in fact looked like caricatures of the real thing), that they were ludicrously out of scale, and that the decals in the Revell plastic kit did a better job of representing the real ship's trailboards. Both the shop proprietor and the other customer looked at me as though I'd uttered some sort of blasphemy.
The interesting aspect of that conversation was the venue: Maritime Models of Greenwich, a few hundred yards from the real Cutty Sark. The proprietor had to walk past the ship on his way to work every day.
Out of curiosity I just looked up the Cutty Sark on the Model Expo website. I found three Continental plank-on-bulkhead kits. Constructo, oddly, offers two. One, according to the catalog, is on 1/90 scale, is 32" long, and costs $250. The other is on 1/115 scale (how on earth do they pick those scales?), is 30" long, and costs $190. (Arithmetic makes the actual ship's length either 240' or 287' 6". Quite a discrepancy.) Both kits are described as having "traditional plank-on-bulkhead construction." The ads emphasize that the two woods used for the hull planking, walnut and lime, make a beautiful contrast. The third kit is from Mantua; it's (supposedly) on 1/78 scale, has a length of 45" (that's 292' 6" on the scale; how nice to have three options), and costs $450. The photo doesn't quite make it clear, but this kit seems to be similar in construction to the two Constructo ones in that the planking below the level of the main deck is a dark wood and the bulwarks above the maindeck are planked with a lighter wood, making a handsome contrast. Handsome indeed. But, as anybody who's either visited the Cutty Sark or glanced at a reasonable set of plans knows, her bulwarks are made of iron.
Then there was the catalog I once looked at (I think it was either Mamoli or Mantua) that was promoting the brass bow and stern ornaments of its new U.S.S. Constitution. (This was quite a few years ago, but I think the kit is still on the market.) The scale of the kit was given as 1/98. I thought that was a rather odd scale. Then I took a good look at the photos of the cast ornaments. (They were presented really luxuriously - and sold separately, in a velvet-lined wood box.) It was ludicrously obvious that they'd been cast from the pieces in the 1/96 Revell plastic Constitution kit. Brass castings shrink by 2 percent as they cool.
I can't tell how many of the horrors I see in these kits are perpetrated by the manufacturers and how many originate with the American distributors. I recall, for instance, reading of an Italian Constitution kit that "it's so accurate that it even reproduces the exact number of frames that are in the real ship." The ad included a photo of the model with the framing exposed. Anybody who'd been on board the Constitution could see that the statement about the framing was an outright lie.
Then there's the celebrated case of "H.M.S. Beagle." About thirty-five years ago Revell, in one of its more daring (but typical) scams, released a little plastic H.M.S. Beagle that, in fact, was a slightly revised version of the same company's H.M.S. Bounty. (The real Beagle actually resembled the real Bounty only in having a hull, a deck, and three masts.) Years later I happened to get a look at the plans of the "Beagle" kit from Mamoli. That kit also is a mirror image of the Bounty. It's perfectly obvious that the plans were based on the parts in the Revell kit - with a neatly-executed rigging diagram that has nothing whatever to do with the real ship. The Revell product originally cost $3.00; Model Expo sells the Italian one for $239.95. Woof.
Several manufacturers make balsa-and-tissue airplane kits that (sort of) represent real airplanes. They're extremely simplified, and their proportions are often considerably distorted in order to make them fly (though most of them really don't). Kids and uninitiated adults spent lots of money on those kits every year. Scarcely any of them get built, and serious scale airplane modelers regard them as jokes. Most European plank-on-bulkhead sailing ship kits (again, I'm sure there are exceptions) deserve to be treated about like Guillows and Comet balsa airplane kits.
I want to emphasize again that my opinions are personal, but far from unusual. You'll hear similar views - or worse - at any gathering of the Nautical Research Guild. I used to work in a maritime museum that held a fairly prestigious ship model competition every five years. The word in that competition was "don't bother entering anything based on a Continental plank-on-bulkhead kit. The judges won't look at it."
Most of the American companies seem to have sprung forth from a different set of ideas and ethics. Heaven knows they've made their share of mediocre kits over the decades, but they always seem to have been making a genuine effort to produce scale models. (I sometimes wonder if the people operating those Italian and Spanish companies have any idea what a scale ship model is.) The best offerings from Model Shipways, Bluejacket, and A.J. Fisher produce fine models - even if they aren't encrusted with "bronzed metal ornaments." I'm also impressed with what I've seen from the new British manufacturer CalderCraft. I haven't built any of that company's kits (partly because I can't afford them), but on the basis of their ads and the reviews they look to me like genuine scale models.
People build models for lots of reasons - which are entirely those people's business. Anybody who enjoys building those Continental kits - and paying extravagant amounts of money for them - has my blessing; it's not my place to pass judgment on what people do with their leisure time. But the vast majority of those kits, unless they're modified almost beyond recognition, do not produce what can reasonably be defined as scale models. And their combination of high prices, inaccuracy, absurd construction methods, and shoddy materials has, I'm afraid, driven far more people away from the hobby than they've attracted.
End of rant. Sorry to have taken up so much space with it.