My turn to chime in and rant:
There will likely be decline in numbers of model railroaders in the near future as the "boomer" generation loses their eyesight, health, and life. Follow-on generations are not entering model railroading in the same percentages because of a lack of exposure, many more competing hobbies, and other reasons. In fact, magazine circulation and some other numbers indicate the decrease in absolute numbers has already started.
At present, being a craftsman is not "in". A hobby that engages your brain with minimal skill with hands is what is popular today - could change tomorrow. This attitude favors RTR and operating trains instead of building them.
In the good old days, where everything had to be built from kits and useful tools were not within the reach of many modelers, very few layouts ever progressed beyond the Plywood Pacific stage. How many remember cutting flex track and gaps with an Atlas track saw? Took a lot longer than a press of my rail nippers. In the '50s, very few middle-class households owned power circular saws, electric jig saws, battery powered screwdrivers, and so on. Building just the benchwork took a lot longer when the boards were cut with a hand saw, the screw holes were drilled with a hand drill, and the screws driven by hand. Owning more than 5 operational locomotives meant you had far too much leisure time on your hands to have built all those kits. The reality is that because of RTR, a far higher percentage of layouts now get well beyond the Plywood Pacific stage, and many more large layouts are built. I can remember reading in the '60s that a layout with 17-20 turnouts was the most a model railroader could reasonably hope to build and maintain.
Because the number of operational layouts is increasing (even though the number of MRs is decreasing), the market for RTR (and high end at that) is sustainable at least in the short term. If the RTR market does crash - and I hope it doesn't even though I'm not a fan/buyer of much RTR - then model railroading will again be a craftsman's hobby with very limited availability of anything. A lot of folks will drop out of the hobby because of the perceived skill/time requirements.
If you want to kitbash and modify locos, there is plenty of reasonably-priced out-of-production on eBay. And that's where I go. But you are not going to get up-to-date kits with accurate body shells and top-of-the-line mechanisms for less than today's high end RTR prices. The cost of today's plastic locomotives is in the tooling, not the materials. Any savings in labor gained by not assembling and adding details to an RTR will be more than lost in counting parts for the kit, writing assembly instructions, replacing lost/missing kit parts, assisting modelers who got in over their heads, and reduced sales over which to spread the tooling costs.
my thoughts, your choices
There will likely be decline in numbers of model railroaders in the near future as the "boomer" generation loses their eyesight, health, and life. Follow-on generations are not entering model railroading in the same percentages because of a lack of exposure, many more competing hobbies, and other reasons. In fact, magazine circulation and some other numbers indicate the decrease in absolute numbers has already started.
At present, being a craftsman is not "in". A hobby that engages your brain with minimal skill with hands is what is popular today - could change tomorrow. This attitude favors RTR and operating trains instead of building them.
In the good old days, where everything had to be built from kits and useful tools were not within the reach of many modelers, very few layouts ever progressed beyond the Plywood Pacific stage. How many remember cutting flex track and gaps with an Atlas track saw? Took a lot longer than a press of my rail nippers. In the '50s, very few middle-class households owned power circular saws, electric jig saws, battery powered screwdrivers, and so on. Building just the benchwork took a lot longer when the boards were cut with a hand saw, the screw holes were drilled with a hand drill, and the screws driven by hand. Owning more than 5 operational locomotives meant you had far too much leisure time on your hands to have built all those kits. The reality is that because of RTR, a far higher percentage of layouts now get well beyond the Plywood Pacific stage, and many more large layouts are built. I can remember reading in the '60s that a layout with 17-20 turnouts was the most a model railroader could reasonably hope to build and maintain.
Because the number of operational layouts is increasing (even though the number of MRs is decreasing), the market for RTR (and high end at that) is sustainable at least in the short term. If the RTR market does crash - and I hope it doesn't even though I'm not a fan/buyer of much RTR - then model railroading will again be a craftsman's hobby with very limited availability of anything. A lot of folks will drop out of the hobby because of the perceived skill/time requirements.
If you want to kitbash and modify locos, there is plenty of reasonably-priced out-of-production on eBay. And that's where I go. But you are not going to get up-to-date kits with accurate body shells and top-of-the-line mechanisms for less than today's high end RTR prices. The cost of today's plastic locomotives is in the tooling, not the materials. Any savings in labor gained by not assembling and adding details to an RTR will be more than lost in counting parts for the kit, writing assembly instructions, replacing lost/missing kit parts, assisting modelers who got in over their heads, and reduced sales over which to spread the tooling costs.
my thoughts, your choices