This can get pretty murky to me but I'll ramble through some thoughts.:biggrin:
Where do you draw the line is hard in any craft, my brother is a knife maker, he does all but forge the steel but takes raw steel, grinds, heat treats etc. He doesn't make the handle material, especially create or grow his trees for the wooden ones lol but still, I would consider his knives to be custom.
Custom/kitless/componentless all will have their own degree of "I did more than the rest" features. To me if you use an El Grande section but do the rest yourself it's kitless. If you use tubes but machine the components it's kitless. You can buy lengths of tubes and then cut to the size you want so if you do that to the same specs as Jr tubes it doesn't make much difference to me.
So if Constant at Lazerlinez makes one of his pens to me it's kitless, to the rest of us we'd be making a kit pen
The awesome clicker you made out of aluminum to me was kitless although it used a click mechanism that was purchased. I also see that there are some pretty awesome areas that I haven't seen touched to mix tube in casting and kitless mixed which may be where you are going with this.....I hope it is because I think it raises a lot of possibilities of what can be done.
And I don't think there are many making nibs, feeds or their own taps/dies or metal lathes to do the threading. It's cool to see some of the posts recently where the pen maker is creating the clip as well........man we are all in such a vortex!