>>5222828For the shows it's personal preference really. Watch Turn A or 0080 for the drama, watch G or 0083 for the fights.
The model kits on the other hand are cheap $10-20 kits (HGs at least) that look fairly nice OOB with little work done (Just your basic panel lines and seam welding along with a topcoat). Since the kits are cheap, you can buy two or three kits and have enough parts to make a decent custom, especially with the recent Build Fighters kits that come with a bunch of spare parts like the Ez-SR.
Since there's no qualms about going for accuracy like scale models however, you can either end up with something like pic related or a clusterfuck of glued-on parts like
>>5222815