I don't know how it can be considered more realistic when the fires, hit sprites, and water all look terrible. Three of 6 things that we see the most in game. Planes/vehicles, sky, land, fire, hit sprites/weapon effects, and water. The gameplay is fine, it's near perfect actually. Everything else could use more work. Also all those nice terrains that are used in scenarios and SEA are not implemented in the MA.
Realism (in looks only -- it is clear to me that AH wins by a lot in realism of flight models) is a complicated mixture of things, and the relative importance of those things will vary person to person. To me, some of these things in rough order of importance are, how the planes look, how the sky/clouds look, how the ground looks, how the water looks, how damage looks, how plane fires look, how building fires look, how ships look, how ship fires look, how cannon hits look, how MG hits look, how bomb explosions look, how buildings look, how vehicles look, etc. This order depends mostly on how much I observe them or how noticeable they are to me when I am flying around in an airplane, fighting. A bunch of the most-important ones are good in AH, in my opinion (planes, sky/clouds, ground depending on terrain, for example).
So, a game might have better plane fires but, to me, worse sky/clouds and so not be as good overall in how it looks to me. To you, it might be a different ordering of importance.
I am not fond of unrealistically Hollywood effects and don't consider those an improvement, though. I also don't like the painted look (seems to me like flying around in the movie What Dreams May Come).
