Plywood Kit Designers

Well, isn't the Contender known to be quite heavy?  So if the weight limit is high, it makes sense that wood can be reasonably competitive, witness Contender and OK.  Whereas if the limit is low, as with the Phantom, wood cannot really compete. 

but in the Phantom's case the boat was already designed to be 61kgs but it was rare that any wooden boats actually got near it (Claridges apart). The GRP boats didn't on the whole either but they enabled owners to have relatively maintenence free sailing.

As for Jim's comment about the frp/grp boats etc, well all of the early epoxy boats came from the same mould as the polyester boats so the performance gain must have come from the weight or stiffness gains (assuming there were some).  I certainly know that when I moved from a poly boat to an epoxy one it was like a different class, so much more responsive, in fact too much and I fell in backwards on a reach. My epoxy boat had 1.5kgs cof correctors too so a massive overall difference to the old boat. I was still using a tin rig at the time and it didn't slow me down overall.

I’d agree with that, that the conservative weight limit of the Contender and OK allow wooden construction to remain competitive, also as mentioned earlier, the shape of the OK being quite boxy promotes quite a stiff structure.

Unfortunately for this argument the OED says "A type of strong thin wooden board consisting of two or more layers glued and pressed together with the direction of the grain alternating." which is slightly less definitive thou "a type of strong thin wooden board" does imply that the material starts out as flat.