My experience with LET gliders suggests that going for the plain anodized finish is a better idea than getting them to paint the ship. Anodized aluminium isn't the easiest thing to get paint to stick to and the paint on our L-23's and L-33 deteriorated pretty quickly. L-23's are good training gliders (though they don't fly quite as nicely as the L-13 did) but when working out relative value for money I think you should look into the airframe life.. Our late model L-23 has a 6,000 hour airframe life (reduced sharply of we were to fly with the extended wingtips) and as far as I could find out there aren't any extension procedures to make it last longer. If anyone knows differently I would love to hear about it as it would give us more flexibility in updating the fleet.