I don't use staples at all anymore. Hot Glue holds much better on bare plywood stations. If you adjust your stapler to hold strips tight to the form you'll have a cross bruise in the wood where the bar crushes the wood. If you ease off stapler power to prevent this the strips can slide up the staple and off the forms even if you angle the staple.

With hot glue it holds firm and to the form. I have hollow sections on my hull near the stems and have no problems with hot glue holding firmly.

It does have to be held in place for 90 seconds until it hardens. This is why I pre-fit each strip, shape it with a heat gun, and clamp it totally as needed, before applying hot glue. This should be everyone's standard operating procedure for stripping whatever the holding method so you don't have problems or surprises when the glue is applied.

Anyway, it's tough to get good hot melt glue shipped to Canada, so I'll probably be using staples for a while longer.

I'can't see why Glu-Stix wouldn't ship to Canada. This is the best hot glue I've used
http://www.glu-stix.com/shop/page/product_detail/Product/1b47a753f52648bb6ed92db99a6d1902.html

And it's a whole lot faster with staples, when doing a 'plain' strip layout intended for paint later. Besides, I don't think hot glue would hold the strips to forms in some areas of a build like Frej.

Everything is difficult before it is easy. Faster? Are you including the time to struggle to remove staples? The more I work with hot glue the faster I get. And I have many holding/clamping tricks I can do with hot glue you can't do with staples.

But, I will admit I thought seriously about switching to hot glue when I was having problems pulling staples without breaking. And for a 'work of art' stripping pattern, staples don't make sense.
So, my mind is not closed on the choices!

If you buy a decent glue gun which has a long tip and doesn't dribble and use the hot glue listed above I think you will like it. It's always good to have more options and as I said before, when you play with hot glue and scrap strips you can clamp anywhere you can hold something with your hand.