Unfortunately, most players base their opinion on the quality of a certain plane on how it performs from how they fly that plane.
Player A flies a P-51D and gets shot down on the first turn after the merge by a plane Player A percieves to be of lesser quality. This then makes Player A think, "WTF! I see all this crap on the boards about perking the P-51D and all these people landing kills and I get killed by a Ju-87! This plane sucks!". Player A then walks away with the percieved notion that the P-51D is over rated from his experience.
ack-ack
I have to agree with this.
You really can't separate the plane/pilot dynamic. As I stated in my thread with this as the topic. The hardcoded data that makes up our cartoon planes only defines the outermost limits in terms of absolutes values (climbrate, turn-rate, speed etc). The only way you could possibly compare that objectively without the player dynamic involved would be a resource like Donzo's charts or the ones HTC provides. Once you add the player to the dynamic to the equation, purely objective comparison is actually impossible. Each person is incredibly unique in every way imaginable. That uniqueness injected into the cartoon plane's hardcoded parameters creates a practically infinite combination of results across the whole spectrum of the plane's core attributes.
Just as a basic example to build on what AKAK said...
I know two fabulous P51 pilots, they both get more than I could dream of getting out of that bird. But, the catch, and the most important thing is, they both fly the P51 in a completely and utterly different fashion. They both fly it beautifully, in a way that makes perfect sense to them personally, but to an outside observer there's very little in common with either except they are both extremely efficient killers. Now, if I am comparing the P51 to another plane like the Fw190D9, how would I do that objectively? I would have to try to find someone in the Fw190D9 that flew with the exact same mindset and profiency as one of those P51 pilots...Given the infinite uniqueness of the human element, that's completely impossible...You can't compare planes in absolute terms beyond what could be derived statistically from an Excel spreadsheet comprised of raw data and charts...
