Fuselage is going together quick. I did make a rookie mistake by trusting the alignment tabs on the formers. I had the entire fuse tacked up using the factory cut tabs and slots and when I checked it for square before glueing everything in place for good the stupid thing had about an 1/8” of twist through the entire length. Soooo...I cracked everything loose and squared it up. As it sits now I’m about as far as I can go until I decide if it’s getting a front battery hatch. The alternative is taking the wing off, I’m leaning toward magnetic hatch.
I think you answered your own question lol. Herr has apparently made the decision to sacrifice on some aesthetics in order to increase the enjoyment for new pilots and builders (ailerons being more complicated to build than a non-aileron dihedral as well as being harder to fly). I bet an experienced builder could easily remove the dihedral and build a straight wing with ailerons.
So this is an awesome airplane, and you're doing a fantastic job on it....but can I bitch about something for a second?
Why do all the Herr kits all have a ton of wing Dihedral? A real Piper cub is an almost 0 dihedral airplane - it's a flat wing straight across. but the Herr kit has this weird dihedral brace setup and it makes the wings almost look comical on the box.
I get that most think of the cub as a trainer, and having a lot of dihedral increases the washout and makes the plane more stable for going around the pattern and flying 3 channel, but I think it really kills both the look and character of the cub.
I don't know if you save your balsa flashing as templates (I used to do this by gluing them to cardboard so that I had a template if I crashed and needed to duplicate a wood part), but if you did (or are feeling like scratch building) you could always build a second wing with 0 dihedral and ailerons and swap it out for when the mood strikes. I think it will make the plane much more aerobatic. Years ago I had a friend who did that with his Herr Cessna 180 (which also has a silly amount of dihedral) and it was a night and day difference.
I know why they do it, it's just they tend to have the most of all the kits and even some other foam trainers. I mean it's like a free flight amount of dihedral.