I have a really great story about Plus. I work in the animation industry in L.A. My very first job in the industry was in 1993 at Warner Brothers Animation. One of the heads of the animation division was Japanese, and he used to bring through guests from the Japanese animation industry on tours of the studio all the time. On this particular day in '93, he brought a group of about four or five...well, Japanese kids through the studio. The oldest one looked to be about 22 years old. The youngest looked about 15 or 16. He informed us that they were working on the new Macross anime. Looking at these kids, I began to think we were in for another Macross II. OVA quality, acceptable, nothing groundbreaking. (I later learned that Kawamori himself was on a tour of Edwards Air Force base out in the desert on the same day, and have seen the photos taken there in various art books!)
Back then I used to attend an anime club in Orange County called Summer Side. It was the standard 10 vhs decks hooked up to a master console type of thing. About a year after the Macross tour came through, somebody brought a Manga Entertainment promo reel to one of the meetings, and on that promo video was a trailer for Macross Plus. It's the same trailer featured as an extra on Manga's Volume 1 dvd release of Plus.
I was blown away. I took it to work that Monday, and a large-ish group watched the trailer in glorious third-gen vhs quality. They were blown away. We looked at each other, and, remembering the tour, said "Those kids did this!!"
It took me some time to warm to Macross Plus, but I now consider it to be not only my favorite iteration of Macross, but one of my favorite anime of all time.
Kind of a shame I didn't get to meet Kawamori, but I still like to share that story to this day!