It is a given that a computer game will never perfectly simulate flight or combat. But if a significant number of aspects that can be modeled accurately are not for the sake of "gameplay", why bother trying to "simulate" anything at all?
Saying that killshooter needs to be on because people will cheat is indicative of a much bigger problem: In reality there is no score besides living or dying, nor is there any way to "cheat" beyond making sure you have all the advantages you can get before you fight. A German pilot might defect to the allies, but they would not let him fly for them. He might turn out to be a spy and shoot down a bunch of friendlies and steal his plane. Unfortunately, in our game, it is not fun to limit people to flying only for one side, which of course would leave the door open for people to cheat. At the same time it is utterly unrealistic for your own shots to hit and/or kill yourself, or even to be harmless to friendlies. Friendly fire is an important consideration in real combat, and I am arguing that any game that does not accurately portray the problems of friendly fire is just that: only a game.
This leads to the issue of icons and range indication. Of course the computer screen does not mimic the abilities of human vision. But, if everyone faces the same restriction, then any limitations imposed by the screen resolution, depth perception, and field of view are moot. Icons are necessary to promote gameplay and have nothing to do with simulation. I have played plenty of sims without icons, including this one. The results are far more realistic despite all of the obvious limitations of monitors. Face it: icons have little to do with compensating for the limitations of monitors. Even Chuck Yeager with his awesome eyesight and situational awareness would not reap the benefits the icon system provides: perfect ID of aircraft type and nationality with precision ranging. Not even the APG-70 and APG-71 series radars (the biggest and best we have) can do this reliably.
Consider the stategic elements of this game: I can wipe out a base and take it purely with a minimum of airpower: a loaded out fighter and a C-47. Show me one instance where any number of P-47s combined with C-47s ever took an enemy position during WWII. The reality of air combat is that it has little direct impact on the war,
except for close air support during key battles. P-51s and Bf109s duking it out at 25000 feet does not move battle lines. It took years of B-17s and B-24s bombing by day and Lancasters bombing by night to have any noticable impact on German front line combat units. Once again, any game which would allow a war to be fought and won in a few hours with merely aircraft is just that.
Of course there are plenty of other compromises I could debate here. Just look at the long list of threads where numerous people debate gameplay versus realism, such as radar and damage modeling. Do killshooter, icons, and other similar features enhance gameplay? Of course they do. Will I ever call any game that uses these features a sim? No way.
In reality, pilots flew because it was their job and they wanted to do their part to protect their respective homes. They might be competitive about who got the most kills, but their overall motivation had little to do with scores. They seldom observed any positive results in the overall war due to their individual efforts and they didn't need any strategic elements to motivate them to keep flying. The reward for a long day of flying was to be alive. If it was a really good day, their buddies were still alive as well. To them, it wasn't "mindless" furballing, it was do or die. If P-51 pilots did it right, the B-17s hit their targets and might make it home to do it again. If the Bf109 pilots did it right, they might stop the B-17s and still have a home and a family when they landed. There is simply no way to fully simulate this, nor is it fun to model it in a game. Who wants to have only one life and death in a game? That is reality and it affects the decisions of everyone who actually engages in combat.
In its MA format, AH is at best a game that happens to use reasonably accurate flight and ballistic modeling. On a relative scale, AH is closer to being a sim than most games. In its CT format, even closer.
But I don't see the point of arguing to make this game more "realistic", it is simply not a valid argument for any game feature. Before you suggest something or start a major flame-war, ask yourself: would this make AH more fun to play? Remember, it has to be more fun for the majority, not just you 
Of course, everyone has a different idea of what is fun. It is up to HTC to decide the type of fun they are going to sell. It is up to us to decide whether to buy what they are selling. At least with the CT, they appear to be listening to those screaming for realism. But even the realism fanatics like myself can't agree on what is realistic.
P.S. Any game in which the P-51D doesn't dominate the skies can't be realistic, can it?
Funny how range and speed are the critical parameters when fighting an offensive in reality, whereas rate of climb and turn rate dominate the MA.
P.P.S. I did not change the content of this post in any way, I only added bold to highlight my real points in the middle of all my rambling, and of course I added this sentence
[ 09-17-2001: Message edited by: streakeagle ]
