Sunfish are rugged and uniform and fixable and they are darn near immortal, and good used ones are always going to be serious competition vs. new. The top quality difference I see in the Guarda boats is the air bags vs. foam blocks for weight but… the foam blocks also added stiffness to the hull, if installed well and kept tight. The air bags can't add any stiffening internally, so, did they add some other stiffening under the deck and along the hulls inside, at the factory, to keep the boat from oil-canning and flexing? Flexing hulls lose energy in racing. If they did add stiffeners, then that's a long term significant advantage. Most of the other features of the Guarda boats, frankly, IMO, while nice, you can put on your own current old used fish by making a few orders from Vela or the other vendors, and be dollars ahead, with parity performance.

The thing that makes Sunfish racing so successful is that you really can't buy a win, just by upgrading the boat, very much; the Association keeps the boats fair across a wide range pf years so, as you say in your comments, Lee, it's not the boat; it's the sailor's skill that ultimately makes a win. And that's exactly how it should be, and what keeps the Sunfish -or any class – alive. I do get your comment about high end "racing" car owners who never go anywhere but shopping or work in their Porches and BMW's. My sense of it is, the great majority of Sunfish owners aren't that type. But I don't begrudge their existence; they keep the factory building new boats, after all, 🙂