Many of our current (mostly traditional) classes started out with plywood as the main material and were built by numerous professional as well as amateur builders.  Measurement tolerances were very understandably ‘generous’ as skills varied enormously.  A good builder would exploit the measurement range permitted to ‘tweak’ as near an optimal form as possible.  Later GRP etc came along and for a while at least good (plywood) builders could possibly keep ahead  of these ‘better’ new materials.

Eventually however the ‘new wave’ builders looked even more carefully at the tolerances available and ‘tweaked’ things a bit further still, all the time learning how to use the materials in new ways.  Many started to produce ‘compound curves’ in previous ‘panel’ areas to great benefit.   Note that this is almost impossible to do with sheet plywood which can only be ‘bent’ or ‘twisted’.  This compound curve approach particularly suited the ‘new materials’ as both the hull ‘form’ could be improved and the ‘stiffness’ (relative to material weight) was raised still further.

Add on a couple of decades and some of these traditional classes reached a point where any builders that remained tend to all produce virtually the same optimal shape – fully exploiting both the ‘new’ materials and the measurement tolerances originally developed to encourage all builder including many amateurs.  Even in some development classes hull form development is today incremental at most - there is little left to exploit in the rules without changing them !

Good FRP boats are not simply copies of the very best wood (plywood) ones that were ever made – they are/were often able to exploit things effectively impossible to produce with sheet plywood !