No doubt that the KEFs are an excellent speaker, the Helios is a superlative speaker. There is a tendency, and I'm not saying you are one of those, to be dismissive of kit speakers. There is a many page thread that pit the Philharmonic BMR's (available as a kit for 1000USD) vs the R3's and while there is not a clear winner, the BMR clearly hold their own and stomped the R3's at a recent unblinded battle of the stand mounts. In fact they pretty much stomped all of the competition. Now those do have a retail outlet and so are not exactly typical of the kits, but guys like Jeff Bagby and Dennis Murphy to name a couple are scarcely amateurs. Theres a great deal of simulation software that was written by avid amateurs--some of which is now commercial. Now so far as I know none own a Klippel, but many exceptional were designed and are being designed without one.
So sure KEF, B&W, Harmon Group have the tools at their disposal to make high value speakers, but remember all but the cost no object are the product of many compromises that the DYI crowd are not subject to--say choosing to use air wound vs ferrite core inductors, spending $50 dollars more for a woofer, adding overkill bracing, using automotive finishes, and so forth. Having active speakers makes the development so much faster than the days of yore (pre-SPICE must have been a bitch) as xo's can be changed on the fly and otherwise mismatched drivers made to work seamlessly. It's a very cool era for DYI--great kits, unbelievably good drivers, powerful, often free software and the internet makes for a vastly different space than the old days.