The range of the Yak3 is a lot better than what people think. Just because it is modeled with unlimited WEP as 100% MIL power, does not mean that you have to cruise with the throttle firewalled all the time. Many other planes will not get very far if the fly on WEP all the time.
As for the durability, it seems like a dice roll. Sometimes they go puff at the first hit, and other times I lit them up with quad hispanos with the only visible effect is the gear falling off. Part of the problem is that the plane is so small that even the tight spread of 4 nose mounted cannons will cover almost the entire plane from 350--400 yards. If you fly a P47N the entire Yak3 can fit between your left and right guns. So the yak3 is very good at spreading damage, and it is just a matter of luck to get some hits registered on the same component.
In term of how it flies, it seems to suffer almost no added drag on the edge of stall. So even though the lowest controllable speed is quite high (100mph), it can still pull its nose way up and soar at near 4000 fpm - stall buzzer yelling and rudder at full deflection. Infact, this plane does not stall at all (except accelerated stalls) - its lowest speed is limited by the rudder ability to counter the torque, while most planes deep into the stall sink and fall out of the skies as they lose lift on the wings or that their engines cannot counter the drag (so they lose even more speed and then sink).
Some of the above features are not unique to the Yak3, and are common to all high powered small planes in AH (Spit 16 is quite close in low speed performance quirks, brewster in damage sponge oddities). It is just that the yak3 manages to get the maximum abuse of all these artifacts.
