Legal arguments aside, and I didn’t mean to kick the hornet’s nest (sorry @Bee). My biggest consideration is if the boats were designed for plywood and fiberglass. A classic boat with steam-bent ribs, frames, etc. would not be able to take advantage of a Maslow, which is what I thought was the whole point of this discussion. Luckily, there are a ton of boat designs available since they started using plywood in the 50’s.
I actually also got the digital plans for a kid’s Optimist pram off Instructables a while ago. It also includes the design for the mold into which you bend the plywood structure so that it maintains its shape until the epoxy cures. This is a much better way to build an Opti because you can reuse the mold to build another Opti. The old school way was to build this big strongback, which you bent the plywood around, then you cut your boat free from the strongback once you had the bottom glassed, making the strongback just a pile of firewood. If you wanted another Opti, you’d have to build another strongback. Luckily, I only have one kid…
If you’re willing to do the work translating, just about any decent boat design can be digitized. If the plans have enough info to lay out parts on plywood manually, then you can draw it up in CAD and you’re off to the races. So any of those older Popular Mechanics plans would be very doable.
A couple of boats I would stay away from are ones like Stevenson’s Weekender and Vacationer, where the emphasis is on ease of build vs. an actually good sailboat. That’s just my opinion after researching them on the forums. But I might be tempted to build a Mini-Cup due to its simplicity. BTW, it was featured in Popular Science. A small skiff like this is very comparable to a Laser, which I used to own or a Sunfish (especially with the lateen rig) or Snark/Super Snark.