A lot of less popular planes have a few dedicated pilots thats have a big impact on the planes score so the stats are not that reliable.
Oh, absolutely. If we look at pure k/d, the planes performance, the role it's playing in the MA (buff hunter vs sucide porker) and the people flying it (including raw popularity) all impact the stats.
The P-38L vs P-38J is the most notable example for that.
However, for the chart above which shows k-d it generally takes more than just a few players to move a fighter out of the median (a high numbdr of kills are necessary for that.) But of course that doesn't invalidates your point at all.
But i belive that it hurt the ego so much to be killed by a brew that people need something to blame their failure on and thats where the superbrew myth come from....
I think the lack of actual knowledge about the plane and the version we have in AH is a very big cause.
It's just like when the Sherman VC was introduced and mnade a powerful appearance on the AH battlefield. Folks were getting ballistic over our 'overmodeled' VC just based on a very vague knowledge coming from a few TV shows telling them the "sherman" was allegedly incabale of "killing German tanks".
It was almost impossible to convince players that our 'Sherman' was a different model with one of the finest tank guns of the war.
There's so much misinformation and unwillingnes to look something up or learn something and so many 'strong opinions' based on a few crappy TV shows out there...