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Why build with "wood" rather than buy "plastic"?
If the shape of a boat one wants isn't available in plastic, then shaping wood --whether it will be skinned with wood or fabric of some kind-- is an easier path than creating the molds and doing the layups for GRP. Also, wood is far more pleasant to work with than the nastiness of 'glass.
A second possible reason for choosing to build in wood is "tradtionalism". A third is "elitism". High-end wooden boats are very, very expensive. Hence, they become another means to flaunt wealth.
I build in wood, but I refuse to build "high-end", and I despise them that want to push boat-building in that direction. Traditionally, for thousands of years, boats were "work boats". They enabled the transportation of people and cargoes, exploration, fishing, and war. Its only in relatively "modern" times that boats became "toys for recreation", and even that time is mostly now past us due to the advent of bicycles and then cars. So even "boating" (as opposed to 'building 'em") already is mostly a nostalgia game due to increasing urbanization.
On a lark, a couple summers ago, I bought one of them "plastic boats", an 8' Pelican kayak, because I was going to be needing a means to get on the water after I finished using a four-seater, wooden boat for a fishing trip with my son and granddaughters and had dropped it off with a friend who lived there locally and for whom the boat would be a good fit. On the basis of my previous experience with canoes and kayaks, I was prepared to be disappointed, if not hate the boat. But its price was just $150 and its weight an attractive 25 pounds. So I took a chance and hauled it with me, both boats on my roof racks, one nestled inside the other.
That's a good boat. Forgivingly stable. Easy to track. Easy to load or launch. There's nothing that building that same hull in wood --or doing it SOF-- would improve, unless one were chasing "elitism". So "plastic" has a role to play in boat-building/boat-using, and Douglas Phillips-Birt, in his history of boat-building, argues that plastic is the admirable out-growth Skin-on-Frame for offering to a boating public an easier, cheaper, and even better means to get on the water. If that is the case --and I think it is-- then efforts to build in wood should be directed toward what that medium could do better, which going to be for each builder to discover for her or himself.
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