I think the point that HT is making is that out of the 5000 some-odd subscribers, less than a 100 have voiced any interest in night.
Night would be rather gamey, or require a great deal of reworking the setup just to appease a small fraction of the the player base. Now, assuming he did do this, he'd then have to bow to the wishes of every other minority group with a quasi-realistic game play request, and then he'd never get anything else done but little tweaks to gameplay.
I liked night in AH1, but it doesn't look like the masses want night, so that's what's good for HTC. I'm sure someone active in the CT or SEA could run a limited night ops set up (small map, and whatever planes were active in night ops [or the closest thing we currently have] etc) to gage the overall interest in a night environment. When the friendly collision/no killshooter thread was going, the CT was setup that way as a test. Maybe a few words with those guys would be all you'd need to implement this. They can tweak icon ranges and dar and all that stuff as well.
Anyway, thought I'd toss that out there.
