I sort'a miss the "old days" when you got a plain piece of finstock and a pattern sheet with which you used to trace out and cut out the parts yourself. That way you didn't end up "wasting" the included finstock as you you would with "die-crunched" or lasercut stuff. Kits like the classic Orbital Transport were great -- a decent amount of generic finstock and balsa nosecones (which would be easier to reshape into custom shape than would be plastic ones).

I did end up buying some of the earlier releases from Custom Rockets because they used same size tubing as Estes, and the balsa sheet wasn't "die-crunched" (printwood wasn't a big problem -- a bit of sanding easily took care of that).