its way more effective than rl ack was in many ways. rl ack wasnt radar tracked and locked for example, and only later in the war proxy fuses were used extensively. rl ack didnt randomly pick one aircraft out of 20 and keep tracking it with every gun available, ignoring everything else. rl ack would have used target selection based on threat, ie they would target inbound threats, not aircraft egressing or fighting at the edge of ack range when others are inbound.
reading combat reports there is a common theme about ack - it was a nightmare for buffs because it would be a wall of ack at roughly the alt buffs were inbound, all fighters had to do was climb a coupla thousand feet and they could go over it.
