I've mostly only played AirWarrior and WWIIOL, but I did play Aces High a bit in my transition from AW to WWIIOL.
First off, it's just a free offer, it's not meant to insult you.
Secondly, the free offer is put this way because WWIIOL is not a free download. Rather than look for major game sponsorship from EA or Sony, CRS/Playnet tried to keep the game dev. company small. When they ran out of money, they made a distribution deal with Strategy First for a boxed release. Because what they were doing was so new, it took much longer than they expected. (Say what you want, you have to give the Rats credit for creating the first virtual battlefield with all the elements, and WWIIOL's vehicles & infantry are definately better than any others.) These delays and the deal with Strategy First caused the forced early release. It was terrible, but for the most part it's only a memory.
On the issue of flight models. IIRC, Aces High still uses a chart based flight model system. That is, a speadsheet is used that says ### alt with this plane = ### max speed and ## degrees min turn radius. Obviously there's a bit more finesse, but that's the gist of it. The sole problem to this method is that it relies on anectdotal nformation about these planes being correct. (i.e. WWII pilots talking about the Spit always turning inside the Bf109. But this doesn't take into account that Bf109 pilots focused on E-fighting and would rarely have attempted to turn inside a Spit. But if the conditions were right, I'd say it most certainly could, although it'd be rare.)
WWIIOL's model however attempts to model the planes as the blueprints called for, and place them in an environment and let the physics do the work. The problem with this is that if this surface is a bit off or that drag coeffecient wrong you get incorrect results.
So when you say WWIIOL's flight model doesn't feel right, you really have no proof unless you've actually flown those planes. Truth is most real WWII combat pilots who've ever seen these flight sims would say the whole lot of us are crazy and that they would have never attempted the manuvers we pull in our virtual world.
So which flight model is correct? I dunno, but personally I believe WWIIOL's is more revolutionary. When we get to the point where our PCs can handle the heavy physics load required to make it work really well, WWIIOL's flight model will decimate Aces High's.
But don't get me wrong, I don't blame some of you for not coming. Personally I kind of miss the fighter pilot community that's somewhat lacking in WWIIOL. But I'm a WWIIOL fanboy, what can I say....
