I've done 18 months of gunnery testing from the alpha into the beta.
1. - Tracers, we have a new light engine so if you widen your FOV, your tracers will shrink. How do you know this, your gunsight shrinks. Good or bad, it is up to Hitech if he wants to make tracers look like blazing grapefruits at the default FOV of 80 so when you shrink everything down by widening your FOV they are blinking kiwi fruits.
2. - Damage testing I've repeated regularly, you need to hit bombers with a lot of rounds because they are built tough. Or kill the pilot. Fighters, the Yak3 seems more in line with the rest of the planes but, from ww2 gun cam, planes didn't just fall out of the air because they were hit. The German 30mm, fighters fall apart 1-2 rounds. The 37mm is still a one shot show stopper.
If you are having kill issues against other players, possibly the internet does not like you. I'm going to bet your damage observations are from online versus chasing drones offline to static test damage.