Ah, the age old icon thing again?
Curtis P-6E, if you can't ID planes at 2 miles, then there's something wrong. Well, unless you mean something like you can't tell a 152 from a 172 at two miles....that I can understand. But what about, say, telling apart two distinctly different airplanes from two miles? I can certainly tell a Beech Bonanza from the aforementioned Cessnas at two miles! Do you not think you could tell a FW-190 from an Me-109 at two miles?
Planes can indeed be tough to SPOT sometimes; it's funny how they can seemingly hide in thin air. But once I find them, I seldom find it difficult to identify them--or at least identify their general archtype (eg high-wing single-engine light monoplane). Spotting planes is something which comes with practice; hollywood-style nonstop panning just doesn't cut it. I find that I need to pick an area and LOOK, then move on. This is something flightsims don't really model--and it has nothing to do with ICONS.
I am amazed at your "can barely tell car color at a mile" comment, unless you live in some REALLY polluted city or somewhere with a severe haze problem. I can EASILY pick out car colors on a highway overpass at a distance of 4 miles as long as the light is right. And as you certainly know, visibility at ground level is reduced over even what you can see at 5K AGL. What is wrong with the area you live/work in that your vision is so horribly restricted? I can do that and I have 20/40 vision! I live in rural Ohio....best place in the country for the 5 months of the year it's actually nice (and a cold grey slushy hell for the rest of the year, hehe).
Of course if the light WASN'T right all you'd see was the sunlight glare off the windows but such is life. Flightsims don't and can't model such nuances yet. I'm not so sure it'd be all that much fun if they did.
Flightsims are a funny thing. The "dot" you see at 10 miles distance in a flightsim is WAY easier to pick out against the background than a real airplane at 10 miles (there's no "hiding in the sky" on a computer screen); yet even at 500 yards your vision in a flightsim is worse than 20/200 due to resolution limitations and screen size--so bad that flying a PC is akin to flying legally blind! Isn't it wierd that computer tech makes you an eagle eye at 10 miles, but blind at one mile?
In other words there is NO perfect compromise. Having NO icons is just as unrealistic as having them, just in different ways. It boils down to a matter of preference. At 6K yards (3.4 miles)--MAX ICON range in AH--a reasonable person could tell something like a P-47 from a Me-109, but probably couldn't tell a 109 from a Spitfire. Like I said....it's a choice between which compromise you want to make. Neither choice is entirely accurate.
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As for why I don't fly much in the CT (the ICON thing doesn't actually affect my CT attendance) :
Low population
Lack of P-51D
No desire to re-live or re-create events of 60 years ago....the past is the past.
Reasons I WILL occasionally fly in CT:
Lack of good fights in MA
Night/Dusk in MA
Other events in MA which make it un-fun.
Not that I think the MA is the greatest thing ever (I view it as pretty flawed conceptually actually), but the CT in its current form just doesn't interest me. It never has.
J_A_B
