I don't think this is a horribly important point, but luban is a copy of an LN plane (or an attempt). The WR was, too, but some static between woodcraft and LN resulted in the WR having some machining and appearance items moved closer to bedrock.
This is a snip from cosman's video comparing the two last year. I'm guessing the WR lost the square bits in the frog and maybe the copied hand wheel and probably a few other things on LN's plane close to 10 years ago. WR never put a brass/bronze lever cap on their planes in the US because you can get yourself in trouble here if you copy non-functional aspects of something too closely. Overseas, it's not like LN would chase someone down for selling Luban planes in the UK or Australia or wherever - they just don't have that much market there, but the static was enough to cause the change in the US.
LN's plane is almost a copy of the bedrock, though -at least the general design. If they'd have copied the original closer, I think theirs would look better (they could still use their color scheme -LN that is). Several of stanley's design elements are more attractive.
Comparing these two without stating they both started as a copy of LN's planes is a little weird, though. Early on, WR's smoothing plane was something like $129 often selling for $99 (with the squarish frog bits and who knows what else copied out of an LN). They're probably $200 here and comically, I saw on the australian forum that the WR planes often sell for the same as LN. That's humorous because woodcraft here generally has a huge markup due probably to their cost structure - both franchise owners and brick and mortar, which means lots of room is needed to pay a bunch of expenses that aren't incurred with mail order. Essentially, australians buying a WR plane are buying something that was made near them, but for someone in the US, originally copying something made in the US to be sold at a much lower price, and then it comes back to them in AU inflated even further.
And the whole issue of trade dress resulted in a bunch of legal experts in australia about american law trying to explain away why woodcraft would remove the LN-like elements from the plane from V2 to V3, I believe.
I would never buy a Luban or WR plane that was copied from an LN pattern to start, but that's my opinion and I don't expect other people to share it.
You can see that both planes (well, you can't on the WR - in the video, the hand wheel to the left is still the LN copied version
(I have gibson guitar to thank for me learning so much about trade dress - and some of their - gibson's - failure to enforce some things because of making marketing claims about the capabilities of certain aspects of their guitars that really aren't functional - just marketing overreach. That ended up burning them because trade dress items have to be something distinctive but not functional. I guess function is covered by patent. The visual differences in the LN frog vs. the now adjusted WR frog on the left would be non functional, as would the color of the lever cap when the change in material offers no difference in function.
Gibson is relatively well known here for doing better legal work than they do quality control on their guitars. At one point in the past, I bought a banjo from a maker and they wanted to ship me a banjo without a truss rod cover due to recent threat letters from gibson. The shape of a mastertone style banjo cover was always a bell. Gibson suddenly started trying to protect the bell shaped truss rod cover and suddenly banjos of other brands were shipped without them. I ended up having to get the truss rod cover in a separate envelope to calm the maker of the banjo, and then gibson shortly thereafter after threatening everyone folded their bluegrass division).
