Fastbuilding ?

I bought a kit recently which proclaimed that it could be built in less than 30 minutes. Apparently this is A Good Thing.

Surely not ?

After all, you buy a plastic kit with the aim of spending some pleasurable time putting the thing together. A significant chunk of the fun to be had is in the assembly. Take that away and you might as well sell the thing ready built.

Obviously this is partly driven by the idea that people have shorter attention spans than they used to have but I wonder if there is something else at work here. This symbol wasn't put on the box by a modeller, it arrived there thanks to the marketing department.

If I were cynical, which I'm not of course, I might suspect that a group of people sat around a table, none of whom were modellers or even interested in model making, and had to come up with an idea for selling the kit. "I know", said someone in a sharp suit, "tell them it won't take long."

And so an important point was comprehensively missed.