When you think about the finished appearance of wood parts on a ship model, remember that different modelers are aiming at different effects.
The HECEPOB (Hideously Expensive Continental European Plank-On-Bulkhead) companies are fond of supplying woods like walnut and mahogany in their kits. Those woods, when finished carefully with varnish, shellac, and/or wax, do indeed look nice. Experienced scale modelers, however, don't like them much, because the grain is ludicrously out of scale. If you'd planked the deck of your Sultana with mahogany or walnut, a 1/64-scale sailor would trip over the grain. (Caveat: some of the walnut supplied in HECEPOB kits is a very different species than one encounters in American lumber yards - with a much finer grain than the usual American stuff.) A ship model that's finished like a piece of fine furniture may look nice. But it doesn't really look much like a ship.
There are lots of styles of ship modeling - and the hobby surely has room for all of them. The wonderful old "Board Room" -style models of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries didn't look much like real ships either. Quite apart from the fact that the planks were usually omitted from their bottoms, they exhibited all sorts of stylistic conventions that were at odds with reality. (The bright red paint on their inboard works almost certainly was too bright, and it's widely believed that the typical eighteenth-century British warship had yellow ochre paint on many of the parts that the models would have us believe were gold-leafed.) Model Shipways kits are designed to be finished "realistically" - in the colors that were on the real ships. A model finished that way isn't going to look like a "Board Room" model - or one built from a HECEPOB kit.
One of my predecessors at the maritime museum where I used to work was quite emphatically of the opinion that ship models HAD to be painted. His logic was that the real ships were painted, and a model that didn't replicate the color scheme of the original ship wasn't an accurate model. I don't agree. In my opinion that argument makes as much sense as an assertion that all photographs HAVE to be taken in color. The term "scale model," in my opinion, is broad enough to embrace quite a variety of modeling styles; that's one of the things that make the hobby so fascinating. Compare Harold Hahn's plank-on-frame model of the Continental Frigate Hancock (as illustrated in his fine book, Ships of the American Revolution and Their Models) with my plank-on-solid one. We used the same basic plans and other references. Harold's is an exquisite, unpainted model; mine is painted (and, in most respects, decidedly less skillful in execution than his). Nobody could possibly mistake one of those models for the other. But I think Harold and I both are justified in calling them scale models - of the same ship.
One of the things that make Donald McNarry such an incredible ship modeler is that he doesn't restrict himself to any one style of modeling. He understands all of them thoroughly - and is a master of all of them.
Any experienced scale ship modeler will tell you that basswood is not the very best wood available for ship modeling - but it's not bad. The grain is nice and fine, it takes paint well and glues superbly, and in terms of hardness it makes a nice compromise between balsa and pine, which are too soft, and the hard fruitwoods, which are a LOT harder (and harder to find - and thus more expensive). It also seems to be quite stable; it doesn't warp unpredictably (like boxwood) or secrete nasty juices (like pine). The bottom line for the model companies, though, is that basswood is relatively cheap. The suppliers mill it into a huge variety of shapes and sizes, and the supply of it seems to be virtually limitless. But basswood doesn't lend itself to the beautiful, deep-look finish that the cabinet-makers' woods do.
If I were designing the ideal wood ship model kit (ideal by my personal definition, that is), it probably would include some basswood in places that wouldn't be visible on the finished model (e.g., planks that would be covered with copper sheathing, or structural components inside the hull). The other wood parts would be holly, apple, cherry, maple, pearwood, and boxwood - maybe with a little ebony and European walnut thrown in for contrast. The fittings would be brass (maybe with some in styrene and/or resin) and britannia (for parts, such as rigging blocks, that are better cast in flexible rubber molds). It would be a beautiful kit. The only problem would be that people of my income level wouldn't be able to afford it.
Now that you've got one of the MS kits under your belt, maybe you'll want to tackle another one and replace some of the wood parts with more exotic hardwoods. (Holly veneer, for instance, is superb for deck and hull planking - and, in the quantities required for a project like this, doesn't cost much.) The stuff is available all right, if you know where to look. I do NOT, however, recommend shifting over into the not-quite-parallel universe of the HECEPOBs. They may look nice in the photos, but (with, admittedly, some exceptions) they simply are not scale models.
Good luck.