Good points.

A strip built hull give you more opportunity to shape the hull the way it should be. That is, the way your design program says it should be for whatever characteristics you've designed. complex curves can be fabricated more easily with strips than with flat plywood sheets. If you can't bend a strip into a shape, you can carve it or grind it with a sander.

The deck is just to keep the water in the ocean and not in your lap. In some cases a deck is what separates a canoe from a kayak. Some of the flatwater racing canoes are little more than kayaks with no decks. You can make a deck for a canoe or a kayak by inserting deck beams (which on a canoe would be curved up thwarts) and bending a thin sheet of plywood over them. Or, you could drape a cloth over the deckbeams and have a strip hull and a SOF deck.

Lots of possibilities.

Artistic desires are probably the driving force behind the fancy wood work on a stripped deck on a S&G hull.

PGJ