Pam and Rick,
You ask really tough questions. I haven't seen Don's DVD, but am now tempted to search it out. Of course, Matt's book is not yet in my hands either. We have to realize that neither Chris nor Don is about to give a fair and balanced review of their relative merits, and you have to expect a modicum of hucksterism from them in the promotion of the book, the DVD or their competing wooden molding planes. Making a review even more difficult is the inherent differences in the media: Some people learn better visually; some better with words and drawings; some need one-on-one real time feedback while they are practicing the new techniques. In any case, the two products will probably complement each other very well. Imagine where you might be right now if your only instructional medium was PBS and you had only watched the NYW, or alternately, if you had only watched the Woodwright's Shop.
I've never been satisfied with either the performance of my molding planes or the moldings I've created with them, or the efficiency with which I created them, so I'm looking for any competent help I can get. I also appreciate the difficulty of even the best crafters to teach a video camera or a typewriter and drafting table the techniques they mastered decades ago, after they have forgotten all the things they did wrong, and all the mistakes they made and all the subtleties of technique they have internalized and consciously forgotten in the meantime. Also, the video camera gives them no feedback, no puzzled looks, no questions. It understands and remembers everything the first time, but at a very basic level.
As to Warne's book of patterns, I think they are exact enough, but then I'm not planning to clip one of the patterns and send it out to Williams and Hussey to grind me a profile, and I'm not going to run several thousand feet of the same molding to trim out a whole MacMansion, and give the stack of sticks to a crew of gorillas with brad guns and a chop saw who don't know enough to keep the pieces in order so that the miters fit. It's not clockwork; moldings are about the interplay of light and shadow, and the shapes are often obscured by the figure of the wood, the patina carried by the finish, and the less than perfect lighting conditions where the finished piece is displayed. The good news is that the PDF of the pattern book is immediately available, so I can use it for planning even before Matt's book arrives from Lost Art. There are definite advantages to a PDF version, even if it is only scanned images, like this one. If I want to manipulate the profiles on my computer with a CAD program or SketchUp, I don't need to scan the paper copy into my computer. If I had a scanner, but it were not flat bed, I wouldn't need to disassemble my paper copy to feed it into my scanner. Once into my CAD program, I can trace it with lines and arcs, and bezier curves and scale, distort and manipulate them until they are exactly what I want. Alternately, I can download the whole book into my iPad and carry it out to the shop and use it as reference when I want to shoot a particular molding.
Enough rant. I'll get back to y'all when the book arrives and I've read it and tried to use it to sharpen my hollows and rounds and technique.
William, on the Cohansey