Comparing "natural" and "artificial" setups to find which one is more "right" is like comparing characteristic fights in the MA and DA. Like Chess and Tic-Tac-Toe. Like comparing the form of asian martial arts' practice/demo patterns VS actual practical fights'. Or hotlapping around a racetrack VS actual racecraft... and so on. One is almost completely static, with no unknowns, whereas the other is much more dynamic and depends much more on improvisation. Both are essential.
You could divide these in three big categories: flying to win (i.e. same as real warfare), flying to have fun, and flying to rule the opponent. First one is self-explanatory: you leave nothing to chance and make killing the other guy the first priority. Second is pretty random: whatever floats your boat. In this one there are no rules, it's all up to taste.
The third one is my idea of truly beating the opponent. Not just grabbing the first chance of winning, but going out of your way to find every possible attempt the opponent could make, and beating every single one. Or at least as many as feasible. In this perspective, the first category is arguably less of a victory and more likely of being a fluke. There's always an element of luck in fights. Method #3 forces you to really have all bases covered. Like going all in to the last challenge in games like "Who wants to be a millionaire?". You don't just stop at the first right answer and run out with the 20$ bill.
If all the possible scenarios for a given fight were a tree, with the ends of the branches being the fight's end, #3 has you traveling to as many victory branch-ends and then tracking back or bifurcating to the next, until as many of those victories' reqs have been satisfied. Much like in modern mock dogfights you don't actually fire your guns but just get a lock (or whatever specifically happens). You paint the other guy dead. Bang bang. Then move on to the next scenario. That's how I see this "weird" #3. It's fun much the same way as playing toreador.
In fact, IMO, when I purposedly and successfully bait a higher con into committing and then overcoming the E deficit, all the way to a kill after not only satisfying victory rule-set #1, but #3 as well, it's me that's dictated the fight, and that's when I can really say that I won. Anything less than allowing and defeating every possible attempt, could have been a fluke.
And even if you ignore all of this. There's the undeniable fun in actually risking something instead of playing it safe... and this is all just a game!
You lose nothing from dying, and IMO lose more from snuffing a fight that could've gone on than you do from dying because you risked playing it unsafe in a fight half as long as the fight you could've had if you hadn't died.
And of course this doesn't exclude those fights where you do have to fly at 100% of what you're capable of. It's actually, IMO, a very good skill to develop - continually modulating your flying to match exactly 101% of what the other guy is doing.
