The biggest problem with the Tamiya kit is that the island is too skinny. Lots of people seem to have overlooked that fact; the company has a fine reputation, and rarely makes mistakes of such magnititude. But if you compare the model to a photo of the real ship taken from an angle forward of the beam, the mistake is ludicrously obvious - and, to my eye, downright silly looking.
Fixing this goof is more complicated than it may look at first glance. The basic island structure can be fattened up with a bit of plastic sheet, but then one confronts such things as the bridge structure, the tripod mast, and the three circular funnel caps, all of which will have to be replaced. And quite a bit of the nicely-molded detail on the flight deck will have to be altered to make room for the scale-width island.
Other critics have noted that the anti-aircraft gun fit isn’t quite right for any period in the ship’s history. I guess that’s true, though I can’t claim to have sorted out that aspect of the ship myself.
In Tamiya’s defense, this is an old kit now and came close to representing the state of the art when it was new (in, if I remember right, the late seventies). The representation of the 20mm guns, in particular, doesn’t come up to modern standards. (Each of them takes the form of a little blob representing the shield cast integrally with the deck. The modeler glues the barrel to the shield. The kit I bought, way back when it was new, offered two alternative ways to make the barrels. The sprues contained lengths of plastic rod, and a piece of soft wire was included in the box. The modeler could either trim the plastic rods off the sprue and cut them to length, using a template on the instruction sheet, or use the same template to cut the wire. The latter option required CA adhesive - which wasn’t universally available in those days.) In the late seventies that was high tech. (Actually, that trick for making 20mm guns has something going for it. Guns made that way look a bit on the crude side but, if memory serves, they’re the right height - which can’t be said about the separately-cast guns in lots of other 1/700 kits.)
Trumpeter does make a 1/700 Hornet. I’ve never encountered a review of it, but if it’s a scaled-down version of the company’s 1/350 kit, it’s pretty good. There were, however, quite a few visual differences between the two ships - starting with the shape of the flight deck forward. (Tamiya did catch that one in its Hornet kit - but the island in that one is also too skinny.)
The Enterprise would be a great candidate for one of Tamiya’s revisions - like what the company did to the Yamato - and, for that matter, what it did to the Missouri and *Iowa. (*The latter two were represented in the old, original “Waterline Series” by Fujimi kits, which, though not bad for their day, couldn’t stand comparison to the new Tamiya versions.) If there’s any WWII naval vessel that deserves a state-of-the-art kit in 1/700, this is it.