I now put my money into World of Warships.
Fast paced action in bite sized chunks. Sure, there are elements that I like and dislike, same as in here. But, after 2 minutes I am actively waiting for my guns to reload and I am smashing that button to fire again. That happens for most of the game.
I left AH because it became a game of chase and people would mouth off but never actually back themselves in combat. There was little in the way of actual combat, it was simply a case of hit and run. Bored me out of the game. I think the wide spread of aircraft is both good and bad but perhaps mostly bad. If I chose to fly a 109E then I was pretty much always going to be defensive because others were in late war planes. kinda fun for a while but then it loses its sheen. would be much better if all other players were in comparable aircraft.
WOWS tries to balance this by matching tiers so no one is completely out matched and you have a chance to compete. How you use that chance is up to you. WOWS also puts you in a room and says 'FIGHT' AH puts you in a large world and let's you do your thing, many (too many) choose to milk run towns and not fight. We even see it in the GV game where hiding is preferred to fighting. The mismatch of planes becomes very evident as we see hit and run or sadly many people chose to farm points from hitting undefended towns and when an enemy fighter turns up they run or bail.
Question is, if you are a combat game then promote <even> combat. The loss in numbers is not due to people leaving the genre, the World Of 'xxxx' franchise proves that. What AH lacks, as alluded to in the OP post, is an active combat environment which means action as soon as possible, for as long as possible and AH does not currently provide that so players like me go elsewhere to get it.
Perhaps in the old days the abundance of numbers masked the issue however now with fewer people playing it shines a spotlight on the issue. There is not enough combat to keep combat oriented players interested.
