The pictures aren't clear enough for me to form a firm opinion - and I don't have an Imai/Aoshima Cutty Sark in front of me for comparison. But several odd features of the new Academy kit sure do look familiar.
The first is the incorrect spacing of the butt joints in the decks. The spacing is "two step" - i.e., there's one "clear" plank between each pair of butt joints on a given deck beam. That was a no-no in wood (or composite) ship construction; building a deck like that probably would lead to Lloyds's refusing to insure the ship. And, if I remember correctly (a highly dubious proposition these days), the Imai kit has the same problem.
The second concerns the cargo winches, located just aft of the fore and main hatches. The forward one has X-shaped gadgets called "cable lifters" on both ends of the larger, lower winch drum. Their function is to handle the anchor cables (when the cables don't have the weight of the anchors on them); the arms of the Xs fit in the links of the chain. The after winch doesn't have such fittings. In George Campbell's 1/128-scale plans of the ship, as a means of saving space, he provides one drawing of a cargo winch. The drawing has a cable lifter on one end and not the other, with notes reading "both ends thus on forward winch" and "both ends thus on after winch," respectively. The Imai kit has two winches that look just like the drawing: each has a cable lifter on one end. (I've always suspected the problem was that the Japanese designers, though perfectly capable of following the drawings, didn't read English.) The mistake can be fixed with an Xacto knife and a few drops of glue in about five minutes. What's interesting, though, is that the new Academy kit appears to have the same problem.
Finally, there's the matter of the "booby hatch" - the little one with the sliding cover just forward of the poop. It's a fairly simple structure; Mr. Campbell didn't bother to draw a detail of it, apparently assuming that its structure was obvious from the inboard profile and deck plan. Imai proved him wrong by rendering it in such a way that, though it matches the drawing from the side and above, it looks ridiculous from any other angle. And the Academy version looks just like the Imai one. (Again I'm going by memory here, but I'm pretty sure I'm right on this point.)
None of these mistakes is particularly serious; lots of modelers probably won't notice them, and failure to correct them certainly won't wreck an otherwise good finished model. But it sure is a remarkable coincidence that all three flubs would turn up in two different kits, released thirty years apart. I don't want to assert, on the basis of what I'm able to look at, that the Academy kit is just a copy of the Imai one. And I suppose it's possible that the designers of two different Asian companies, working from plans with text in English, could make the same three mistakes independently. But it's quite a coincidence.
[Later edit: I just took another look at the photos to which LenRoberto kindly linked us. The details of old, 1/160 Academy kit are a little hard to make out on my little monitor, but it certainly looks like those three strange errors are present in both Academy kits - as well as the old Imai/Aoshima one. It's also obvious that the two Academy kits are indeed quite different from each other in other ways (e.g., the handling of the rails around the forecastle and poop). Just what relationship exists between the three kits - Imai/Aoshima 1/125, Academy 1/160, and Academy 1/150 - is beyond my capacity to figure out.]
I'd be interested to see the two side by side. Plastic model companies are notoriously casual in their references to scales - especially when it comes to sailing ships. The Imai/Aoshima kit supposedly is on 1/125 scale. (The Campbell drawings are on 1/128. I've never laid the Imai parts on top of the drawings, but I strongly suspect they match.) I wouldn't be at all surprised if Academy's 1/150 and Imai's 1/125 turned out to be identical. But that's just idle speculation on my part.
Bottom line: if the Academy kit is a copy (or scaled-down version) of the Imai kit, it's a good kit. Fixing the too-numerous butt joints in the decks would be a bit of a project, but not especially difficult. (I suspect the spurious ones could be filled in with Milliput or something of the sort; that might take an hour or so, plus drying time.) The winches could be fixed by slicing the cable lifter off one and sticking it on the other (ten minutes). And the necessary corrections could be made to the "booby hatch" with plastic sheet (half an hour). Maybe a total of two hours to fix all three goofs. In the context of the time it takes to build a sailing ship model, that's negligible. And the price of $60, though Olde Phogies like me tend to gag over such figures, is quite a bit cheaper than the Aoshima reissue of the Imai one - or the big Revell one. (For that matter, I'm not sure the Aoshima one is available at the moment. Squadron doesn't list it.) If, gawd forbid, I were in the market for a plastic Cutty Sark kit, I'd see no reason not to put this Academy one on the short list.
I certainly hope those Flagman kits materialize. The computerized drawings of the little brig look promising - obviously the work of somebody who knows what he/she is doing. And what an irony it would be if the first plastic 74-gun ship-of-the-line on the market should turn out to be Russian!
I've only seen reviews of a couple of products from this company - the little U-boat kits. The consensus seems to be that they're pretty good, especially as the first efforts from a new firm. Flagman, it seems, has an extremely ambitious program in mind. (Take a look at some of those old Russian pre-dreadnought-era warships. And that Flower-class corvette should be popular.) I just hope the company hasn't bitten off more than it can chew. Given the bargain prices for which Russian kits usually sell in the U.S., there may be some kits on this list that I can think seriously about actually buying.