One point of order with Corsairs out in the SWP, and you can see from the skins I've done so far, is that paint condition (and general cleanliness) varied widely. There would even be some variation in the actual colors, too, depending on the supply chain (see Marine's Dream for an excellent example. Although shipped out in blue-gray over light gray, at some point before she was wrecked her upper wing surfaces had been oversprayed non-specular sea blue, and some sources suggest she had a light gray vertical stab, which is NOT typical for F4Us in the early-war scheme. Note she wrecked in Dec. 1943, well after the Navy officially switched to tri-color, but other than the sea blue overspray on the wings still carried the early-war scheme).
Squadrons like the Jolly Rogers managed to keep their aircraft relatively clean and freshly painted. Then again, you have Marine birds like Vargas Cowgirl and BuNo 17883, which show considerable fading and wear (inner third of Cowgirl's wings have been heavily sand-blasted, and White 883 shows strong discoloration where fuel leakage has eaten away paint along some of the panel edges). For that matter, one Black Sheep (BuNo. 17740, have a partially completed skin I've been fiddling with) even had the OLD roundels without bars top and bottom on its port wing because it was grabbed from another wrecked aircraft, and no one ever bothered repainting it. Some aircraft retained the red surrounds on the roundel well after the switch was made to blue, resulting in new aircraft off the assembly line with blue surrounds, flying alongside other aircraft with the red.
Based on all this, I honestly would not be surprised if some squadron somewhere had an F4U whose paint was in such terrible condition, they decided to just strip it off and be done with it (either due to time, or even lack of paint).
And if it WASN'T ever flown on a combat sortie...not like there's not already historical skins in the game that were never actually flown against an enemy...
