It's always been that way.... Nothing new here...

Hot Rodding, as any other activity, has 3 kinds of participants:
1. Those who watch things happen
2. Those who make things happen
3. Those who wonder what just happened

There's still a lot of us who build what we want how we want. Trends are fine for people who don't have hyper-avtive imaginations and would rather use established combinations, colors, bodies, or whatever... They are no more or less a Hot Rodder then anyone else.... A store bought car is just as much a Hot Rod as any home built... Don't matter the road you take, what matters is you've arrived.... I made a good living for a lot of years building cars and modifying cars for others who didn't have the time, talent, or equipment to do it themselves....

Then again, it depends on your definition of innovation..... I don't think a car is innovative unless every panel on the car has been altered or changed in some way, shape, or form... Others think innovative means a really unique paint and graphics layout on a Deuce..... He's just as innovative as I am, just that are methods and materials are different....

Rat rodders like to tell us how different there cars are....but if your car isn't like theirs then it's not a rat rod.... So then they were called "traditional" cars, usually built by youngsters who heard one too many stories about "back in the day" at happy hour someplace....

Hot Rodding is about doing what you want...If that's copying somebody else's car, that's fine... If it means starting with a pile of tubing and a few sheets of aluminum, that's fine too....

There is no definitive definition of a Hot Rod... and I've seen a lot of copy cat cars that are done to a much higher quality then the original they copied........ No group or faction is better then the other, they're all just doing what they want which IMO is far more important then being innovative or being a copy cat.....