I'll keep things relatively short here just to avoid overstaying my welcome, but I recently ordered the 28mm Yakata kit from Empires at War:
https://empiresatwar.co.uk/product/28mm-japanese-yakata-kit/. I didn't see many reviews for that in particular, but their 15mm ranges seemed well-liked enough, so I thought I'd go the whole hog and get the set as something I could do over the course of a week or two this summer.
Having got most of the way through, I've
generally liked the results but I've been more than a little frustrated (to put it mildly) with the process of getting there. The detailing is actually quite nice in most places as the etching is quite fine, but construction sometimes felt like a bizarre form of psychological torture. Scoring lines being misaligned with cuts was something I could handle as a bit of a quality control oversight, but then I had pieces being noticeably different between the instructions and the actual kit (in particular, the real things have fewer aligning tabs and holes), a number of pieces being incorrectly sized and requiring trimming, and some really tight tolerances that meant a mixture of filing holes to widen them and making liberal use of a mallet to get the job done. Worse still (or perhaps a small mercy), the mansion building I was given was missing its front wall and half of its roof battens, and I wasn't particularly willing to scratchbuild replacements, so that lies unfinished in pieces.
Is my experience completely unique here, or has anyone else run into these sorts of issues with this kit before?