The gaminess is due to the following:
1) There are no negative consequences of dying; in fact, there are some POSITIVE consequences of dying (you don't have to RTB and land and you can re-up faster).
2) There's no guilt associated with not only killing yourself, but destroying a very expensive bomber and killing a bunch of crew members that you've flown with for a long time.
The conditions in the MA basically steer players's behavior so that in real life, they'd be categorized as narcissistic sociopaths.
I'm not sure if anyone's played Dungeons and Dragons but WAYYY back in the day, when it was first published, there was an obscure rule referred to as the "Angry Villager Rule". What this rule said was that no matter how powerful and well armed the party, if they went around and started acting like a bunch of sociopaths (killing villagers for no reason just to steal their stuff), the DM could rule that the villagers somehow devise a way to defeat them. It was basically a way to steer people's behavior so they would face consequences for narcissistic sociopathic behavior and basically avoid gamey stuff. A bit heavy-handed, but it worked.
However, people thought the rule impinged on their "fun" so it disappeared in later editions of the game.
If you want to get rid of gaminess, you're going to need some kind of "Angry Village Rule" and have to steal yourself to the fact that there will be an uproar from people who have just had their fun squashed.