EBergerud makes a number of interesting points. For what it's worth, I think I agree with most - though not quite all - of them.
Of all the subjects that plastic kit manufacturers have undertaken, it may well be that the wood sailing ship is the least well-suited to the medium and material. Styrene is a wonderful, versatile substance, but it has its limits. Posts about sailing ships in this Forum are full of complaints about too-flexible spars, busted eyebolts, warped decks, etc., etc. There's just no way, even in the hands of the best manufacturer, that styrene is a good material for making eyebolts, belaying pins, or small-diameter spars.
There's a widespread fallacy that the "right" material for making a model is the same material from which the prototype was built. EBergerud notes that there are some big practical obstacles to that approach (e.g., trying to build a model of a tank out of steel). But it's also true that not all materials are capable of "miniaturizing" themselves. Wood has grain, and grain has scale. Veteran ship modelers know that oak, for instance, is a lousy modeling material - even if the prototype was made of oak. A tiny piece of oak, incorporated into a 1/96-scale ship model, just won't look like a piece of 1/96-scale oak. (A 1/96-scale sailor would trip over the grain.) That's always been one of my many beefs with the HECEPOB (that's Hideously Expensive Continental European Plank-On-Bulkhead) crowd. Most of those kits are made out of woods that, though they may be nice for building furniture, just don't look like miniaturized wood. Basswood, the favored material of good American kit manufacturers (e.g., Model Shipways and Bluejacket), is a lot better, but has its own problems.
Experienced scale ship modelers find themselves gravitating toward super-hard, fine-grained woods, like boxwood, cherry, pear, and my personal favorite for planking, holly. The grain in those species is so fine that it's almost invisible. They come out of a table saw with a glassy-smooth finish, and with a little practice you can finish them in such a way that they actually do look like miniaturized wood. But they're hard to find in quantity (lots of experienced modelers cut their own branches), and they're too expensive for the kit manufacturers to consider.
It's occurred to me more than once that the ideal sailing ship kit would be a multi-media one, using lots of different materials according to which one is best suited for the particular component of the ship. It's entirely possible to cast a beautiful, accurate hull in resin (see below). Deck planking - holly. Figurehead and other carved ornamentation - cast resin or britannia metal. Fittings (guns, winches, etc.) - cast metal or resin. Deadeyes and blocks - cast britannia metal. Masts, yards, and other spars - wood (preferably cherry or degama, but I'll live with birch if the manufacturer picks the pieces carefully). Gunport hinges, rudder pintles, and other flat parts - photo-etched metal.
A couple of enterprising manufacturers have taken hesitant steps in this direction. For a while, a few years ago, Model Shipways was selling its New York pilot schooner Phantom with a cast resin hull. I bought one, mainly out of curiosity (and the price, on sale, was right). I had some criticisms of the kit, but I thought MS was on the right track. I had a lot of fun building it, and I'm pretty satisfied with the results: http://www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/JohnTilleyPhantom/index.html . Apparently I was in the minority, though. Shortly after I finished mine, the kit was reissued with a machine-carved basswood hull.
And a small firm called Cottage Industry Models is offering a mixed-media nineteenth-century American revenue cutter: http://www.cottage-industry-models.com/Alexander%20Hamilton.htm . I saw this one close-up at an IPMS convention a couple of years ago; it certainly looked like a first-rate product. The price is a bit steep for my wallet, but I don't think the company ownership is getting rich.
Do multi-media kits like that represent the future of sailing ship modeling? I don't know. I have to say that I think the plastic sailing ship kit is, for better or worse, just about dead, and I have decidedly mixed emotions about the ways in which the wood kit manufacturers are moving these days. (That's a subject for another post - or five or six.)
Some ship modelers turn up their noses at kits in general, contending that the only "legitimate" way to build a model is from scratch. As a sometime-scratchbuilder, I'll readily concede that scratchbuilding offers rewards that working from kits does not. But I also think there's a place for kits - especially as a means of introducing new modelers to the hobby. I hope that, one way or another, serious, historically accurate sailing ship kits will be around for a long time - and I suspect that, in one form or another, they will be.