| Doug:
|     The reality is that plywood is an excellent boat building material with a superb strength to weight ratio

The reality is that a cedar strip is an excellent boat building technique that looks great too. How beautiful they are!

| compared to the solid glass boats

There is a logical fallacy, something about comparing to the irrelevant option. Not gonna bother to look up the name, but I see what you did there.

| .... but needs to be done right, as does anything. 

And one knows ply was not done right when the core turns to mush. But it is easy to fix, right? You just cut out the mush and fix it on a remote island, right? Its not like it will fail in a storm when you need it.

| Foam sandwich is a difficult and expensive method for home building most boat shapes.

Bullshit!
We JUST showed how foam and glass is cheaper than ply built. Perhaps you meant YOUR experimental home built boat tank would be more expensive if built in foam IF you listen to how to do foam from to a guy who doesn't know much about foam, don't count any of the other boat building costs, and care not a whit about your time or health.

| Few designers, probably actually none, have taken the effort to design boats that can be built easily and simply with foam infusion. 

You personally know one. How many do you need?

| The typical home built foam core boat is going to be built of strips and planks and sheets

The typical home built boat will never be built, right?
What the ignorant masses choose to do should effect us how? I think this is another logical fallacy I don't want to chase down the name of.

| Commercially built foam core boats are in my opinion poorly made due to the inability to guarantee a strong reliable bond on the "blind side" in the female mold. 

There is at least one that is doing infusions much like Rob's. Builds HP's too.

|  Currently there is a large cat listed for sale for next to nothing due to large expanses of rotted balsa core.

A short aside:
There is a craft technique called 'resin infusion', where one submerges items in a vac chamber containing a very low viscosity, one part, heat kicked resin. Evacuating the chamber causes the item to absorb the resin it is immersed in. It is removed and heated until the resin kicks.
People make coasters out of stuff like resin infused breakfast toast.

So, I imagine, and this is a made up thing, one could do a balsa core, resin infused, if one could get a very low viscosity resin, and hold vacuum long enough to saturate the core. So balsa MIGHT make a slightly cheaper almost water proof core for II, IF the amount of resin consumed did not make the core too heavy or expensive. It opens the possibility of using one part epoxy in an infusion, if one can heat the mold easy enough, as cheaper foams cannot take the heat under vacuum to kick the epoxy.

But why would one not just use a proven system?

End aside.

| On the other hand there are plywood boats that are as much as 50 years old that are still quite sound...... good construction and good maintenance.

Are you suggesting there are no balsa core boats that are still fine after 50 years? There are caravel built boats that are in fine shape after hundreds of years.
Are you suggesting because some old tech still works, that's a good boat building option? Because that's, for lack of a better word, stupid.

| They are inherently lighter and stronger than their solid glass cousins.

I think I remember now. This is a classic straw man fallacy, right?

| Realistically Rob's intelligent infusion process applies ONLY to a very few designs engineered for it.  If you want to use intelligent infusion, you build an HP, and if you build an HP, it's foolish to use any other construction method.

Bullshit!
One can build any boat in II. I am building kayaks out of Rob's II. YOU PERSONALLY could build your tank cat out of it. Certainly any ply boat can be built out if it, so what are you talking about?
However, as discussed very recently, if you are not building a HP, as you are building a lesser boat, right? Lesser in every objective criteria or value one can have for objectively evaluating boats.

I mean, if I want to build a Viking longboat, that's cool, right? But calling it easy to build, light, cheap, safe, and fast, is, objectively, wrong. Saying it it is a great way to build boats is, for lack of a better word, stupid.

But comparing this longboat to a Woods cat is silly for any objective standard for picking a boat for sailing and cruising. Innate coolness of a viking longboat aside, one does not cruise in them for a reason, I imagine.

| As for myself, I may be able to use some of the methods Rob has pioneered, and gain some advantage from his innovations, but those possibilities are greatly limited by my choice of boat design.

Your inexplicable, indefensible, and incorrigible choices are your own difficulty. You could actually engage the designer who's designs you like to design your cat tank, and reduce all the parameters most boat builders hold dear, like cost, build time and weight. But I think that is excluded by your parameters.

| My particular set of parameters automatically exclude the HPs much as I admire Robs work.  Those parameters are specific to me, and only me, and they are not subject to change.

Your secret 'parameters' are the only problem. They cannot be engaged. If you came here suggesting you would like to build your 30' cat tank, because 'cat tanks' are cool, then you could probably get more help.