Hi All,
As far as the paint question goes it's pretty much a personal choice and local availability
I happen to work at a hobby shop in New Jersey and we only stock Tamiya Acrylics and the Testors brand (i.e. model master). I personally use tamiya paints because they airbrush really good, but I don't build alot of plastic models. Revell paints are actually made for revell by a third party and are kinda hard to come by, but that said revell-monogram was recently sold so who knows. People don't seem to want to build anything anymore, at least where I work, even our most popular RC Cars come prebuilt (traxxas, hpi)! I will try to up some pics of some interesting things just gotta go find a nice image hosting site that my peer guardian will let me go to