Donnie - Plastic models are made in rigid steel molds, which cost staggering amounts of money and seem to enjoy Eternal Life. They get used over and over again for years. (Revell's first ship model was a 1/535-scale U.S.S. Missouri, first issued in 1954. It's still in the Revell-Monogram catalog. Apparently the company dusts off the molds periodically and squirts out a few thousand more kits from them.) As the molds age they do show wear in various ways - most notably in the form of "flash" where the parts of the mold don't quite fit together any more. But it takes many years, and thousands of moldings, for a mold actually to wear out.
The vast majority of sailing ship kits currently on the market are made from extremely old molds. Revell, for example, produced its last genuinely new sailing ship (a nice replica of a Viking ship) in 1977. And that "Jolly Roger" you're building is, as we've discussed, a reissue of La Flore, which dates from the late sixties or early seventies (I'm not sure which).
Molds also change names. Sometimes a company goes out of business, and some other firm acquires the molds. (Many of the sailing ship kits currently being sold under the Lindberg label were originally produced by a company called Pyro in the fifties and sixties.) And companies share molds, usually for different markets. In the case of the Golden Hind, I think what happened may have been that Heller made an arrangement with Revell to distribute some of the latter's kits in continental Europe. Why Revell chose not to use its own European distribution system for that purpose at that time, I have no idea. But several Revell kits turned up in Heller boxes. The reverse has also been the case more than once. I'm pretty sure that at least one kit in the current Revell Germany catalog, the 1/150 Gorch Fock, is a reboxing of a Heller kit. Things get especially confusing when two companies make different models of the same kit, and then work out agreements with each other. Revell produced a Santa Maria back in 1956. Heller made one that was about the same size, but (I think) a completely different kit, in the late sixties. At this point, if I saw a Heller or Revell Germany box with the name Santa Maria on it sitting on a shelf in a hobby shop, I wouldn't want to place a bet on which kit was inside.
Nowadays molds seem to be migrating around the world of kit manufacturers at breathtaking speeds. The current Revell Germany aircraft model catalog, for instance, includes kits that orginated with Revell, Matchbox, Frog, Aurora, Hasegawa, Italeri - and probably a couple of more that I'm not aware of. Some of those kits represent the current state of the art. Others were far from the best on the market when they first appeared - thirty or forty years ago. Let the buyer beware.
Katzennahrung - In another thread we've been discussing the bizarre history of shrouds and ratlines in Revell sailing ship kits. The Golden Hind that I have is from the original 1965 issue, and has (or had, before I made the obligatory sacrifice to the trash can) plastic-coated-thread shrouds and ratlines. I believe more recent issues of the kit in Revell boxes had injection-molded plastic shrouds and ratlines; I imagine the version in the Heller box does too. The finished model in the pictures posted by Donnie has thread shrouds and ratlines, obviously rigged by the modeler. He also seems to have replaced the plastic deadeyes (and, more importantly, the plastic "rope" lanyards between them). The improvement is obvious.