Well...I guess I'll take this one on - with the big caveat that I haven't built the kit. I did, however, review it for a magazine when it was initially issued, and I've discussed it in quite a bit of detail with people who have built it or are in the process of doing so. If you scroll down the topics list of this Forum you'll find several very interesting - and long - threads about it.
To begin with, it is in most respects one of the finest products of the plastic scale model industry and probably the best plastic sailing ship kit ever. And in my opinion it is, in terms of historical accuracy, one of the three best renditions of the Victory in kit form. (The other two are a tiny white metal kit from Skytrex, on 1/700 scale, and the mammoth, expensive wood one in 1/72 scale from CalderCraft, also known as Jotika.) But the Heller kit has some serious problems. They concern accuracy and, for want of a better term, buildability.
Like most other Heller sailing ship kits, it appears to have been designed by superbly skillful artisans whose knowledge of real ships was, to put it as gently as possible, deficient. In that respect it's much superior to most of Heller's earlier efforts, some of which were downright ludicrous. The Victory kit doesn't suffer from most of the silly inaccuracies that wreck those other kits. Its hull lines are accurate, and most of the detail is excellent. It even has deck camber, which most Heller ship kits don't.
There's some argument among enthuiasts about just how the ship looked at the time of Trafalgar. Some modelers have gotten upset with the kit because it doesn't have the elaborate entry ports on the middle gundeck that are such prominent features of the real ship nowadays. I personally have my doubts about that one. I'll be more than happy to be corrected on the basis of further evidence, but I'm inclined to think the kit is correct. (The evidence I've seen has almost convinced me that the entry ports weren't there in 1805.) I think she probably had shoulder-high forecastle bulwarks, which the Heller kit doesn't. But it's about as accurate in overall outline as any kit - or published set of plans - out there. For that matter, it probably represents the Victory's Trafalgar configuration at least as accurately as the actual, restored ship does.
The problems mainly concern smaller parts. Somebody on Heller's staff thought belaying pins had sharp points (they don't), the spokes of the steering wheel don't have any detail, and the clear plastic skylight on the poopdeck has no camber on its top. The detailing of the deck planking leaves something to be desired. (The butt joints aren't distributed right, and there are no margin planks. On the other hand, Heller did a beautiful job with the complex hull planking.) My biggest criticism of the kit, though, concerns the parts related to the spars and rigging.
Heller's reproduction of the masts and yards is generally excellent (though if I were building it I'd replace the studdingsail boom irons). The designers obviously followed a good set of plans. But they apparently didn't understand some basic features of how a sailing ship's top hamper works. In an almost unbelievable howler, they provided no means of attaching the yards to the masts. (Apparently they're just supposed to hang there.)
The other big complaint I have with the kit's rigging is, to a large extent, endemic to the nature of plastic kits. The hundreds of blocks and deadeyes provided with the kit are unusable. In a sense that's not Heller's fault; the injection molding process, by definition, cannot produce a part with a hole in it and a groove around it. But anybody thinking about tackling that kit needs to be aware that the blocks and deadeyes will need to be replaced - either by scratchbuilt ones (and anybody who's up to that task isn't likely to be interested in plastic kits) or by aftermarket wood or metal parts. Ship model companies like Bluejacket and Model Expo are perfectly capable of supplying nice blocks and deadeyes for this kit, but the cost of those parts probably would exceed that of the kit itself.
Some modelers will disagree with me, but I think the various jigs and other gadgets provided with the kit for setting up the shrouds and ratlines are silly - and in some respects unworkable. (There's considerable discussion of that point in the other Forum threads.) The kit also contains a "loom" for making hammock nettings, which is downright absurd. And it needs to be acknowledged that some parts of a sailing ship just don't lend themselves to being reproduced in styrene. If I were building the kit I'd start by throwing out all the hammock netting stanchions, the deadeyes, the blocks, and (of course) those hideous vac-formed "sails." At that point, having consigned several hundred parts to the wastebasket, I'd probably start wondering whether I'd spent my money intelligently.
The kit I reviewed was made of high-quality styrene (though I questioned some of the garish colors), but people who've bought it recently report problems with warped, brittle plastic. I can't speak from experience about that, but I can see that it would be a significant problem.
Then there are the notorious instructions. The original French ones are extremely hard to follow - especially the rigging diagrams. The people who wrote them had, at best, a highly dubious understanding of how a ship's rigging works. And the English "translation" of the instruction book is, in a kit of this complexity and price, a scandal. It apparently was written by somebody who neither understood French nor had attempted to build the model. Anybody starting this kit needs to get hold of at least one book. (My first recommendation is C. Nepean Longridge's The Anatomy of Nelson's Ships, with John McKay's Anatomy of the Ship: The 100-Gun Ship Victory as a close second.) To build that model solely on the basis of the instructions in the box would be almost impossible.
At the risk of sounding snobbish, I feel like I ought to emphasize that it's definitely not a kit for first-time sailing ship modelers. Under the best of circumstances, building a model like that takes a long, long time. (I doubt that anybody - with the possible exception of a retiree who could work on it full time - could do it less than a couple of years.) In the course of a long project like that one's work improves; the learning curve is relatively short, but steep. More than one person who's tackled a kit like that has gotten extremely discouraged because after working on it for six months, he discovered that the first parts he did weren't acceptable to him any more. In the case of this particular kit, that state of affairs is greatly exacerbated by the need to fix the errors in the kit, replace so many of the parts, and get along without an adequate instruction manual.
So my verdict, I guess, is that this kit is about the biggest mixed bag in the plastic kit industry. It has the potential to produce a beautiful, intricate, accurate model. But doing that will take a mighty big investment in time and money by an experienced modeler who knows what he or she is doing. It's certainly worth considering - but go into the project with eyes wide open.
Hope that helps a little. I'm sure other Forum members who've actually built the kit will have some interesting things to add.