Design and build is challenging, depressing and rewarding in equal measure, but kits cheating? - Cheating what exactly? I'd argue that many can get a lot of satisfaction or accomplishment from constructing things from a kit. A lot of furniture from a well know Swedish store is a "kit" - is that cheating?
If you didn't design it you're doing nothing more than the audio equivalent of one of those Scandinavian furniture "kit's". What's the point?
If you're doing it from scratch well you have my admiration...
"Is that the right type/grade of wood I've got?" "I asked 5 'experts' and they all told me different things!"
"Will the cabs resonate, rattle?" "should I put bracing in?" "Where?" "will it make it worse by increasing the resonant frequency?"
"Does that tweeter integrate with that woofer well? "Does that sting in the treble come from bad crossover design, cabinet refraction, poor tweeter?" "oh I'll just try 4 different types of tweeter @ £400 a pair for each type I try"
"ah well it looks that intractable colouration problem is a cabinet effect so I'll just junk the £300 of wood and the 60 hours spent in my shed building them, the sanding, the veneering etc and start again with no real idea if the next ones will be any better...."
And that's all before we get to crossover design, obtaining good directivity and in room power response, port tuning, finding optimum amount of fibre stuffing!!
I fear there are hordes of home designed and built speakers out there with boomy bass and/or a top end that can remove tooth enamel, honky squawky mid range, obvious colourations from cabinet panels, bad driver integration etc etc and which probably cost their builders more than if they'ed bought new! FFS the experts get it wrong sometimes even at the likes of KEF, B & W etc!! Most long standing famous speaker manufacturers have at least a few models that are not well regarded... It's black magic I tell you!!