Julle is one of the sad delusional Warbirders who believe making things uneccessarily difficult equates to ultra realism. While low icons is perhaps a step in the right direction no icons is not realistic at all not even with the best hardware currently available.
The MkI eyeball is a very complex bit of kit but it works very well...so well him upstairs never felt the need to update or patch it
You can never offer the same kind of detail and visibility on flat 2 dimensional computer monitor and this is made worse when you can only run at 1600x1200 max. The other problem you have is its never going to be a level playing field with a multitude of computer specs out there limiting many players by the maximum resolution their pc's can handle and also the size of hteir monitor making a difference also.
No radar? while I might not always agree with the accuracy given in these sims it does simulate the control tower giving the location of cons, perhaps to make what we have realistic a little more lag is needed in the way it updates.
Zoom and icons...well I've already covered that above
RPS - I enjoyed tha RPS in Warbirds but it was ALWAYS a point of contention for both sides as WB never had a large enough planeset to fill in all the gaps so often we had 'substitutes'
very histroical. One day though when one of the sims has a big enough planeset this can work but only as an alternative to the main arena and let the players decide where they play, there is definately a market for the current AH MA thats for sure. If you want to look at how revered the WW2A/RPS was in WB take a look at AGW attopics just in this last month with many players describing how it split up their squads and saw many players leave.
As for the historical planeset, we have the CT for that and it sees enough players to make it interesting and probably more than the War Room or EA as I remember it. I used to fly there but got fed up of flying with 3 other players, the War room is a failure plain and simple and a concession by iEN to try and keep a bunch of realism zealots subscribing.