If my recollection is correct (these days my recollections frequently aren't), the Heller Victory kit does provide for the shrouds to be arranged properly around the mastheads. The lower mastheads are molded separately, with long pegs on their bases that plug temporarily into the "ratline loom." The modeler is supposed to set up the shrouds around the masthead, then unplug the masthead from the "loom" and plug it into the rest of the mast. Maybe somebody who has the kit can correct me, but that's how I remember it.
The system really is quite ingenious in a way - if one accepts the fundamental premise that seems to lie behind it: that rigging the ratlines after the shrouds and lower masts are in position on the model is simply too much of a task for the modeler complete. That's where Heller and I part company.
The other problem concerns the deadeyes and lanyards. Heller came up with a clever approach to that one, too: molding the deadeyes on the sprues the (supposedly) correct distance apart, so the modeler can rig the lanyards before detaching the deadeyes from the sprue. Good idea with two fundamental flaws. One - the deadeyes don't work, because they don't have grooves around them. (Imai seems to be the only company that's figured out how to mold a styrene deadeye or block with a groove around it and holes through it. I didn't think it could be done, till I saw the Imai/Academy "Roman Warship" kit.) Two - the Heller designers assumed that the spacing of all the deadeyes on a given mast is the same. It isn't. The shrouds "fan out" at the bottom; the one at the after end of the channel slopes at a considerably steeper angle than the foremost one. The upper and lower rows of deadeyes are parallel. So the linear distance between the two aftermost deadeyes is noticeably greater than the linear distance between the foremost ones. If a set of deadeyes were rigged according to the Heller instructions, the sheer pole (the iron or wood pole that runs along the top of the upper row of deadeyes - absent from the Heller kit, but better made from wire than plastic anyway) would be on a pronouced slope.
As for ratlines - I don't feel entitled to criticize individual modelers, or to evaluate the manual dexterity of people I've never met (or even laid eyes on). There unquestionably are folks out there whose fingers and eyesight are, indeed, not up to the task of rigging ratlines to scale. My complaint lies not with the modelers, but with the manufacturers (whom I consider fair game in forums like this).
Plastic sailing ship kits have been around since the mid-fifties, when three American companies decided, within two or three years of each other, to apply the new technology of injection styrene molding to that kind of subject. Two of those companies, Aurora and Revell, seem to have concluded in the very beginning that rigging ratlines was beyond the capacity of the plastic modeler. (The third, Pyro, simply ignored the problem.) Aurora, in its primitive "Black Falcon Pirate Ship," molded something vaguely resembling shrouds and ratlines in styrene. (Even my brother and I, who were about fourteen and six years old at the time, thought those looked awful.) The designers at Revell, in one of the worst decisions they ever made, came up with a system for making "shrouds and ratlines" out of plastic-coated thread; the modeler was supposed to cut them free from each other and (somehow or other) fasten them to the molded "deadeye and lanyard" assemblies and the mastheads. Some of those early Revell sailing ships were beautifully detailed and quite accurate, but those plastic-coated thread concoctions made the finished models look pretty awful. Serious ship modelers held them in contempt.
That, I think, is one big reason why the sailing ship phase of plastic modeling has always been one of the least popular: it's never gained acceptance from the wider ship modeling fraternity. Nowadays only an idiot would deny that a good plastic kit is a sound basis for a scale model of an aircraft or a tank - or, for that matter, a diesel locomotive. Even the twentieth-century warship modelers seem to have accepted that plastic is a legitimate modeling medium. But the vast majority of sailing ship modelers still think plastic kits are toys - largely, in my opoinion, because the manufacturers have convinced the public that the rigging of a plastic sailing ship kit has to look phony. At the present time, this phase of plastic modeling is almost dead. Revell released its last sailing ship in 1977; Heller and Airfix dropped out of the market shortly thereafter. Pyro, Aurora, and Imai (probably the most intelligent and innovative of all) have long since gone out of business. The remaining handful of plastic sailing ship enthusiasts is surviving on 30- to 50-year-old reissues (many of them bearing silly names, like "Captain Kidd" and "Jolly Roger") and on e-bay.
To me personally, one particularly irritating feature of all this is that there clearly is a market for sailing ship kits. Modelers by the thousands (probably the tens of thousands) shell out vast sums of money every year on HECEPOB (Hideously Expensive Continental European Plank-On-Bulkhead) wood kits from companies like Mamoli, Artesania Latina, Mantua, Corel, etc., etc. By any objective standard of scale modeling, the vast majority of those kits are garbage. They represent actual ships with far less fidelity than the typical plastic kit does. Yet they've built up a following of modelers who, as soon as they've finished one or two HECEPOB kits, feel entitled to sneer at people who build plastic kits. Why? Well, there are several reasons, but one of the big ones is that most of those HECEPOB enthusiasts have never seen a model based on a plastic kit whose shrouds and ratlines didn't look phony.
This sermon has, as usual, gone on far too long. To people breaking into the hobby, I offer two suggestions on the basis of fifty years' experience. One - read. This is a hobby for people who like to read. Sailing ship modeling opens a door into a spectacular world of literature - fiction and non-fiction - about models, real ships, and the people who built and sailed them.
Two - don't underestimate your skills until you've given them a fair chance to develop a little bit. I'm convinced that the average modeler, contrary to what the manufacturers seem to think, can rig ratlines to scale on a 1/100-scale model. It takes some time, but not as much as you think (and probably not much more than it would take to make those Heller gadgets work). OK, some unfortunate individuals lack the dexterity, or the close-range eyesight, to do it. (If I hadn't been born near-sighted I'm not sure I ever would have gotten into ship modeling. And arthritis can make it difficult, if not impossible, to build models at all.) But most people's fingers are perfectly capable of doing it once they get a little practice.
The muscles and nerves of the human hand are amazing things. Particularly impressive is their ability to learn. Try rigging a ratline. No, try rigging ten of them - and time yourself. My guess is that the first one, on a ship like the Victory, will take fifteen or twenty minutes. The second will take ten or twelve, and number ten will take four or five, and by the time you get to the top you'll be wondering what all the fuss was about. More than one participant in this Forum has found out that, once he's given his fingers time to train themselves, rigging ratlines is actually a relaxing way to spend an evening. And I can almost guarantee that the improvement in the appearance of the finished model will make you conclude that the time was well spent.