This is a game, a competition. It pays to increase your skill level dogfighting. In the MAs no matter what you do, B&Z, run, pork, or JABO, at some time or another your going to be the one at a disadvantage. If your the one that prepared for that scenario then you will still have an some advantage. One that the other guy won't realize till probably too late.
Agreed, partially. I say dueling is stupid because, if you "build your skill" only under such artificial, stilted conditions, you won't learn to be flexible enough to deal with the other situations in the arenas or in events.
There are any number of expert duelists who win most of these 1-on-1s at "twenty paces" but are helpless in any situation BUT a co-alt merge where their favorite trick always works for them. They either whine about their "unfair" disadvantage (which they can never reverse because all their fights start "fair") or they whine that they were outnumbered, or say the guy(s) who shot him down only won because of their initial advantage. Well, duh. Maybe the other guys are smarter about setting themselves up with alt or position before they ever spotted you, and had the engagement in the bag from the get go. Or maybe the whiner is dumb enough to attack a pack of planes, rather than waiting for help, or for a situation that he has a good chance to win.
None of these scenarios involve a co-alt, headon merge with no firing HO on first pass. Neither did real life, for the most part. I did read an interesting story of two guys who actually had a duel, with "seconds", during the Spanish Civil War (with the haughty Luftwaffe pilot coming off second best and lucky to get out of there only "wounded" but with his arse still attached); but these were rare.
There's more to winning a fight sometimes than rudder and stick input. Situational awareness can win you a fight before there's a fight... AND can get you out of it when you'd otherwise get yourself killed. So, IMO, SA is 10x more important than a few pet dueling moves.