Well, it certainly can't hurt. I hope everybody's aware, though, that "we'll pass your suggestion to our marketing department" is a standard tactic that usually (not always) translates into "thanks, now please go away."
Some years ago I sent Airfix a nice letter complimenting the company on the quality of its warship kits - the best of which, I still contend, can stand comparison with the best on the market - and urging it to release some more. I got back an even nicer, quite personal letter thanking me for my long-term loyalty to the brand and assuring me that my opinions were taken seriously. Airfix hasn't released a new warship since.
Warshipguy - your enthusiasm is refreshing, and I hope you're right. Airfix is under new management, and the new executives may well have a better appreciation for the essence of the hobby than their predecessors did. I certainly hope so.
It looks to me like the manufacturers are not expecting us to buy the same sailing ship kits they've been producing for thirty years. They're expecting us not to buy plastic sailing ship kits at all. Take a look at the hard evidence. Revell (US) has removed all but one of its scale sailing ship kits (its very first one, the 1/192 Constitution, which is now more than fifty years old) from its catalog. The Heller kits, for the present at least, are all gone. Airfix is reissuing most (not all) of its old sailing ships; that company may be the biggest cause for optimism. Revell Europe offers more sailing ship kits than does its American counterpart, but the company management gives the distinct impression of having little interest in, and even less understanding of, what actually constitutes a scale sailing ship model.
There certainly is plenty of room in the market. Warshipguy's favorite subject, the Napoleonic Wars, is represented, so far as I know, by several plastic kits representing precisely one ship: H.M.S. Victory. Years ago Airfix made a tiny H.M.S. Shannon. So far as I know there has never been another plastic kit representing a vessel of the Napoleonic Wars. Maybe, by stretching the point, we can count the two Heller ships of the line from earlier in the eighteenth century; I'd have to look them up, but I think a few ships of that class may have survived into the age of Napoleon. Oh - and there is of course the U.S.S. Constitution, the only American sailing warship that's ever been the subject of a respectable plastic kit. (I find it hard to count the old Aurora Bonhomme Richard, the Pyro training ship Alliance, or the tiny Pyro Constellation in that category. And the attempts by several companies to pass their Constitution kits off as the United States certainly don't fit in it.)
Indeed, almost the whole realm of the sailing ship is wide open to plastic kit manufacturers. Only three American clipper ships, the Flying Cloud, the Sea Witch, and the Swordfish (the latter only in an ancient Marx kit that I know only by reputation), have ever been turned into plastic kits. With the Revell Morgan and the Aurora Wanderer off the market, there's no respectable American whaler. There's never been an American packet ship. Or a pilot schooner. There's nothing from the American Revolution (one of my personal favorites). Nothing from the fishing traditions of any country except the U.S. and Canada. Or a British East Indiaman. Or, apart from the excellent Airfix Wasa, anything from the great Scandinavian or Dutch maritime traditions. Or, unless we count Columbus's ships, anything from Spain. The list of potential subjects is almost literally endless.
Part of the problem, it should be admitted, is that the standard approach to plastic kit design is in many ways unsuited to sailing ships. Styrene is a wonderful, versatile material, but it has its limits. As many participants in this Forum have noted, styrene is not really a good material for spars. Nobody except the geniuses at Imai has ever figured out how to make a passable representation of a block or a deadeye in a rigid mold. (Imai apparently used multi-part "slide molds" - hugely expensive.) And I'm afraid that, despite all the ingenious efforts of Heller, Airfix, Revell, et al, there's just no way to make it easy and quick to rig realistic shrouds and ratlines. (The photo-etching process just may offer some promise. So far as I know, though, nobody has yet tried to make a plastic sailing ship with etched metal parts. I've written to several aftermarket manufacturers; none of them, so far, is interested in producing sets of parts designed for sailing ships.)
Another problem, well-known to anybody who's ever tried to make a living selling model kits, is endemic to sailing ship modeling in general: the more experience a modeler gets, the less money he/she spends. An aircraft modeler may spend a week or two on a kit that cost $20 or $30; in the course of a year he/she probably will spend several hundred dollars on kits - to say nothing of paint, tools, aftermarket parts, etc. The purchaser of the Heller Victory, if he/she makes any effort to do a passable job on it, will be busy with that one kit for at least a year. My scratchbuilt model of the frigate Hancock probably has something in the neighborhood of $200 worth of materials in it; I worked on it (by no means consistently) for six years. Heaven help the hobby dealer or manufacturer whose business depends on people like me.
It's often occurred to me that the ideal sailing ship kit might be a "mixed media" product, with a styrene (or perhaps resin) hull, cast-resin and turned-metal fittings, and accurately-turned wood spars. A few companies have made some hesitant gestures in that direction. (The last sailing ship I actually finished was based on the Model Shipways pilot schooner Phantom kit. It had a cast-resin hull, cast britannia metal fittings, and wood spars - which I replaced. It had its problems, but I genuinely thought MS was on the right track. Apparently I was unusual in that regard. Before I finished the model MS took the kit off the market and reverted to the machine-carved hull version.) I've seen ads for some cottage-industry kits with resin hulls and wood spars. But only a handful of them.
Maybe we will, sometime in the not-to-distant future, see a change in the wind. But I wish I could be more optimistic.
I'm curious about that Trumpeter Mayflower. I've never actually seen it, and the commentaries on it I've read have been decidedly negative, but several folks who've bought it seem to think it's a reissue of an older kit (of so-far unidentified origin). Can anybody out there enlighten us? I know of one other Trumpeter sailing ship: a Golden Hind that seems to have an even worse reputation. Trumpeter, having tested the waters in that hesitant fashion, seems to have followed the lead of virtually all the other manufacturers and given up on sailing ships.
In any case, I believe the dubious distinction of "most recent plastic sailing ship kit" belongs to the two medieval cogs from Zvezda, which have only been around for (if I remember right) two or three years. I was hoping for more from that source, but it seems to have dried up.