We have full realism now. Relaxed realism would be where you don't stall out, ever, you never spin, you get 10x ammo with no weight penalties, where fuel lasts forever. If you take into account the fuel burn being increased well over normal (2.0 last I checked?) we have stricter rules than reality in AH, as it is, now.
The things you mention are not "left out to make the game easier". They not included for reasons of overall gameplay and player base preference.
Night flight sucks. It always has and always will. You want it, fly offline. You'll get the same results: No enemy to oppose you, you can milkrun all you want. Almost the entire player base logged off en masse EVERY time the sun set. They gave us periods of dawn/dusk where it was dark for only a short while, and STILL the majority of the player base logged off.
Night is left off because nobody WANTS it. A vocal minority request it over and over, but the numbers don't lie. P.S. the info about the majority of players logging off? Comes directly from Hitech's mouth. HTC can track their own stats, and they do. This game is much better without night time.
Weather is missing, sure. I wouldn't mind some different overcast tones to the sky, some clouds drifting around, etc. However, AH is about giving pilots the same tools and letting them use their skills to come out alive. If there's a raging thunderstorm and you die, it wasn't up to either you or the other pilot's skill, it was the AI-controlled weather that killed you. For no reason. Keep in mind weather is fine as long as it doesn't determine the outcome of the fight. It's got to be up to the players to decide who wins and loses, otherwise we'd all be playing offline AI games like IL2 or MSFS. [EDIT: Also, flight operations were usually cancelled when the weather was bad. D-Day was centered around the only break in the weather they were gonna get. You think they'd even TRY if it was raining? The face of the world would be different today if the weather hadn't cleared enough to let planes fly.]
Bomb cratered runways? When was this an issue in the war? Most dirt fields spanned cubic acres, and if one part had a hole the planes could land elsewhere. Otherwise, if it was a US field in the pacific they had inter-locking metal plates. If one small area was damaged, they'd fill it in with dirt, remove the broken plates, and put in new plates. Simple, fast, easy to repair. If we're talking a finished full-installation airfield, well most of those were outside axis bombing range, and even if they were attacked they often had the equipment ready, on-hand, to repair things fast and efficiently.
We already have a full realism game. What we lack is relaxed realism. [EDIT: You could consider AH1 "relaxed realism" -- even though it was more realistic than WB and AW combined. AH2 has even more realistic hit zones for aircraft and better airflow code since a few major patches ago]
All the other features -- well there are reasons we don't have them. Those reasons don't include "catering to the newbies" (adding planes like the spit16 the la7 and so forth is as close to catering as HTC does, it seems)
