I can help a little regarding the old Aurora kits - though I haven't seen any of them in years. As I remember there were four in the series: the Hartford, Sea Witch, Wanderer, and Bonhomme Richard. They appeared in the late sixties, and weren't on the market long. (Aurora went out of business a few years later.) They came in nice, fancy boxes and sold, I think, for about $7.00. They seem to have been designed to fill a gap in "price points" between the two ranges of Revell sailing ship kits - the 18" ones, which at that time sold for about $4.00, and the 3' ones, which sold for $12.00 or $15.00.
The Sea Witch was a modified reissue of an ancient ITC kit; it's since been reissued at least once under the Lindberg label. The other three, so far as I know, were original Aurora products. Frankly my opinion of them was, and remains, pretty low. The detailing on the hulls and decks wasn't too bad, though they had a certain, exaggerated toy-like quality and it looked like the designers didn't quite understand some of the prototype features. (The oversized countersunk grooves around the hull planks and copper sheets, for instance, screamed "plastic model" at any observer.) Most of those problems probably could be corrected by a determined modern modeler; a good paint job would make quite a difference. But the big problems started at deck level and went up. All those kits had hideous, injection-molded plastic "sails" molded integrally with the yards. The "canvas" was about six scale inches thick, and the things weighed so much that all the masts and other components of the top hamper had to be out of scale in order to support them. Even worse, the "sails" (on at least some of the kits; I don't remember all of them clearly) seemed to have been pirated from the vac-formed ones in Revell kits. So such things as "seams" and "ropes" were represented as heavy raised lines on the front of the "sail" and trench-like grooves on the back.
The Bonhomme Richard was a reconstruction of the real ship; no plans of her have been found. The Aurora impression of what she looked like wouldn't stand up to serious scrutiny by anybody who's familiar with the subject. Serious scale modelers would be well advised to avoid that one. The other three seem to have been based on decent plans, and with a great deal of work (including replacement of all the spars and deletion of the obscene "sails") probably could be made into respectable scale models. Somebody who desperately wanted a model of the Sea Witch, Wanderer, or Hartford probably would find that those kits would save some time over working from scratch. My suggestion to everybody else would be to avoid them. They probably have some value as collectibles and nostalgia pieces, but there are lots of better starting points for scale models.
Youth, talent, hard work, and enthusiasm are no match for old age and treachery.