many are perfectly happy with it remaining a dog-fighting arena.
Many as in 4?
But really, your post is spot on.
I would love to see some new planes added, but it would not fix the root cause of the arena's problem by itself.
There would be some initial interest to try them out, then the players would realize "Oh, it is actually still the same borinng, stale, one diminsional, pointless, one meaningless furball arena that it always has been." and they'd head back to the strat enabled war in the WWII MA.
And it has little to do with it being WWI. If they burdened their premier WWII arena with the same unfortunate design, they would be put out of business within a year. If the more popular WWII MA couldn't survive that design mistake, I don't know how its reasonable to expect the less popular WWI genre to be able to support it.
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Wab