I just finished an Estes Saturn V and it was truly a PITA. Looking at the instructions, the Alway model looks like a simpler, more accessible option.
Having built a 1969 Centuri Saturn V ( The basis of the Estes 2157 model) I can say it's a long and sometimes frustrating process, but it doesn't really require Olympic class modeling skills.
However, following the instructions pretty much to the letter makes a big difference -- especially the painting / masking/ finishing instructions.
It's a long story I've recounted many times before -- my grandmother bought me the Centuri Sat V for Christmas 1969, and my then 10-year-old self opened the box, spread out the parts, read the instructions, and concluded quite accurately my modeling chops at the time would have totally botched the whole thing.
So I packed it back in the box, slid it up on a storage shelf in my bedroom, then waited 25 years until I had been out of the house 15 years and my dad said, "hey, are you ever going to move that rocket stuff out of your bedroom?"
So, in 1994, I went back and built the damn thing, and it turned out pretty good (in fact it has been used as a museum piece in a real live museum).
And once it was built, I drove up to my grandmother's house, where she was still living at 98.
I asked, "Nana, do you remember what this is?", and she said she absolutely did, she had to search through a dozen stores to find it, because I had been utterly insistent at age 10 that I wanted the CENTURI Saturn V, not Estes, because the Centuri was a better and more detailed kit, and I was hell bent I only wanted the Centuri model.
So yes indeed she remembered buying me the rocket in 1969. But she assumed I had flown and forgotten about it about 23 years earlier.
So I told her I had finally gone ahead and built it, and i wanted her to see it fly. I set it up on the pad, she pushed the button, and up it went. It was the first and I believe only model rocket flight she ever saw in person.
It went up and came down perfectly. Nana raved and said, can you fly it again, so I packed up the chutes, put in new engines, and off it went again.
Nana was like Elsie in "October Sky." She said it was "fantastic" and said, "if I knew this was what your rockets were like, I would have built my own back in 1969" (when she was a youthful 74).
So anyway, I flew it four or five more times-- a couple in 1994 and twice in 1999 for the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11. But since then I've kept it on the shelf, not wanting to chance a CATO or parachute failure. It's "Nana's Saturn."
I've got an unbuilt Estes 2157 in the garage, I think I'm gonna build that as my "flying model" and launch it next July 16.
The Alway model is somewhat (considerably) simpler, but it is not a one day build.
