Plating is vastly superior to a sleeve.
I beg to differ. There is a company in England who have spent a few years developing a range of replacement liners for motocross cylinders which they now offer under their own Mitaka brand name. These can be fitted for a similar price to a re-plate but thereafter you can simply re-bore as they have oversize pistons available up to 2mm.
These have been running in the UK now for over two years in large numbers and there have been none of the drawbacks which the manufacturers told us had to be avoided when they moved away from iron liners all those years ago. There is no distortion due to dis-similar metals heating at different rates, there are no hot spots formed in the cylinders due to poor heat transfer, there are no seizures due to supposed poorer lubrication qualities, the longer these things run with no problems the more it looks like the whole plated cylinder thing was just another big mass production con.
The other thing that always confused me about plated cylinders was why they always run them with chrome rings. To conform to engineering principles, if you are running two metal surfaces against each other there should always be one of them softer than the other as this concentrates all the wear on one of them which you then make easily replaceable, it also reduces friction. This would necessitate running cast rings in plated cylinders (which we do with the minibike engines) as the rings then take all the wear (easily replaced), and also has the added benefit that you can have a sezure and frequently get away with a hone as the ring is too "soft" relatively speaking to damage the cylinder. Running chrome rings in plated cylinders is a total contradiction to this and not surprising therefore that it frequently results in destroyed barrels.
Oh, and in case anyone is worried about high revs with an iron liner, we run an 100cc kart with an Iame Sirio engine which revs in excess of 19k, it has an iron liner!