Agreed.
The scoring system is slanted heavily towards encouraging turn fighting as opposed to other tactics.
As others have already said: It's very much the opposite. If you really want to get to fighter rank number one without actually being the best of the best, try flying a hard hitting high speed monster plane.
Very few players would be able to get to #1 by using a relatively slow, but 'turny' plane, where often your fight ends by your opponent speeding away in his Pony or LA or you are getting picked off. A fast monster plane allows you to rush in, kill, then race away looking for the next victims. This allows you to keep up your kills/sortie and kills/hour. Planes like the Pony (yes, I'm serious), Tempest, Me 262 and so on are perfect for this.
With something like a Tempest, you can swoop through a furball or smash a Jabo raid and harvest half a dozen kills while staying almost untouchable the whole time.
Of course there's also a good dose of skill required still, but much less than doign the same thing in a slow turner.
I have been ranked #1 fighter 8 times in my AH career. Each time, without exception, it only happened because I was flying almost exclusively monsters like that - Me 262, Me 163, Tempest. No way I would ever be ranked #1 in something like a Zero or even Spit 8.
There are players capable of pulling that off, but it's only a very tiny minority... perhaps like 10-20 at most?