I've been fond of RC cars since my first supermarket car wheen I was 6, so I guess that qualifies as a RTR, that is probably what gave me the virus, that and building lego all day long. At around the same age , if not earlier, my grandma offered me this :

http://www.1000steine.com/brickset/images/8815-1.jpg

Yep, of course I was way too young to be able to build it. So my mom dit it for me. I broke it. She rebuild it. I re-broke it. She told me to rebuild it myself. So, well, I was just forced to. Ha, memories !

Long story short, when at 13 I had saved enough money to buy myself a tamiya macap, my dad, horrified by the price, decided to build it himself overnight, and I found it more or less finished one sunday morning. To this day ( 30 RC cars later, and all of them having been rebuilt several times) I still really feel I have been deprived of something really special that night. He could'nt understand, of course I would have liked to have him around for help, but seriously, I guess that first build would have felt like a ceremony, ha ha !

So , I like kits of course, but I feel traxxas and others don't hurt the hobby. Those who like it will stay, the others won't have spent too much time or missed an occasion to try RC.

One thing I hate about RTR, much more than their equipment which in 2010 is not that bad at all, is the fact that you can't find them as kits. For instance I would find quite fun to race at my club with a HPI sprint ( Local superstar Jean-Marc Betticher kicked everyone's ass last month with it) but I don't want pozi wood screws, I want hex M3 srcews everywhere and it is very unpleasant to crossthread holes. Other than that this car has bearing everywhere, steel gear diffs, steel dogbones, adjustable camber links... I think if the sprint could be found as a kit I could well have bought one, just for fun.