Hello Terry, good to "see" you.
One other point is retail price. I'm not sure what the ratio of car modelers to military is, but most of the nice kits on that side of the fence seem to be a fair amount higher than the $10-20 we're used to paying for a new car kit.
Even so, you're right. The "high end, pro" kits we get often suffer the same lack of crispness as the regular kits. Trying to remember back to the airplane kits I've built in the past. They were certainly the less expensive variety, and I'm thinking they were comparable to our stuff.