Dapol and their livery choices

George Smith of Dapol is complaining about poor sales of their Dogfish ballast hopper. I think this is a lovely model, which is marred by Dapol's bizarre decisions on liveries, which in turn has depressed sales. The first release was in a dubious all-over grey which I think is supposed to represent faded olive green, but it's with TOPS data panels which makes it inappropriate for 50s/60s era modellers. They've not done it in actual olive green, or in the later 'Dutch' grey/yellow colours. They're claiming that the 'body is wrong' for the latter livery because it had an 'extra panel'. I'm highly sceptical of this; all photographs of dutch liveried Dogfish look exactly like the Dapol wagon to me, and the wagon experts on the ModMod list all insist that there was only ever one body design, and none were rebodied when repainted into Dutch. Have Dapol done some dubious research?

He's also moaning yet again that modern modellers have 'deep pockets and short arms', and is (again) threatening to stop making modern models unless 'we' buy them. He's citing the poor sales of the BR blue class 73 as an example. Personally I think one problem is that Dapol are releasing too many models in too short a period, and are forgetting people only have finite spare cash at any one time. Something like a blue 73 in a long-lived but historical livery is likely to be the sort of thing that sells slowly and steadily over a long period. It's not a good fit for the limited edition 'feeding frenzy' approach which is more suited to short-lived contemporary liveries. BR blue really should have been one of the first liveries, not the last.

I want Dapol to succeed, and I want to encourage them to continue producing diesel and electric era models. But I also want them to learn from mistakes, and don't want to be bullied into paying good money for flawed models, or things I don't actually want.