I completely understand your sentiment, and have never understood why SSW would erect this barrier to sales, but this is a very nice aircraft and your loss if you let this issue get in your way.
Hi odourboy,
in your post there is hidden the answer to your question.
It is a long debated question:
- to open the site to show all our products publicly or set a filter (i don't consider a "barrier") forcing visitors to register to the site, which is free and takes few minutes ?
Well, i guess our way will be more clear if you consider that SSW is not a business oriented company, we do high quality models for passion not to get a budget.
Don't need nor desire more visibility, our users, or better our "friends", are the best testimonials for us, you are one of them.
It is also a matter of how we are organized, we are a little group, each one of us has his own work, making planes in our free time, we could not support an huge set of customers, that's also the last but not the least reason why.
So we would like open the site to who are really interested in our work, filtering "casual" visitors.
It could looks like a strange way but is our way.
cheers
/SSW