I think paint designs are very important for homebult aircarft. For one, a slick looking paint job I think can really enhance the personal pride associated with building... not only does it fly, but it looks beautiful! Airplanes are works of art in their own right.
Secondly, although it is not fair, when the average person sees our planes, they will make the initial judgements based on cosmetics. If we build planes that have professional looking paint jobs, I think this gives our aircraft, and thus our whole activity, more credibility to the general public (perhaps I'm overstating this, but if an RV were to be shown on the news, I'd rather see one with a snappy looking paint job, to impress the public).
Many of us are military aviation buffs, and some choose paint schemes reflecting this. I personally am thinking of replicating the gold and dark blue paint scheme of the "Golden Centennaires", a Canadian demonstration team preceeding the Snowbirds. The Golden Centennaires flew CT-114 Tutor's in 1967 (the Canadian Centennial year, the team was only formed for one year).
Check-out my website:
www.c-func.com . Using MS Flight Sim, and some information I got through these forums, I was able to reproduce my paint scheme on a MSFS model, and take some screen captures which are on my website (including one parked at Ottawa airport, where I'm from; I found some detailed custom scenery for Ottawa). Anyone notice that it's actually a -7A model on those MSFS captures? I'm building a -9A but the -7A was the only RV model I could find that came with a paint kit. I just took the pictures so that the shorter wing-span was not too obvious