I think the SAME standards should be applied to COLLISION LAG as are applied to SHOOT DOWN LAG ... is that any more comprehensible ? It's consistant.
You're right that it is inconsistent from a front end perspective but it is still the best solution.
Look at the alternative for guns for example...if it only mattered what your opponent sees on his end, most bullets you shoot would miss. You could potentially empty an entire round before you killed someone, or, you could completely miss someone on your end and would randomly hit them on their end. The aiming game would be entirely a crap shoot relying completely on latency to estimate where someone actually is relative to where you see them. The fact of the matter is, the way it is now is perfectly acceptable because 99.9% of the time someone shoots you, they have a gun solution on you on your end. Yeah, his nose might sometimes be pointed one degree off of where you think his gun solution is but you learn to expand what you view as a gun solution and it really works out great as a player knowing that as long as you hit somebody, they will take damage. Do you question this setup?
As for the collisions, you keep saying that fighting close quarter combat is too risky and both players should receive penalty for it. That's quite absurd. You can learn to fight close and avoid collisions very easily with a little practice. Two skilled players can stall fight for hours without colliding one another. Collisions happen when someone gets greedy for a gun solution that simply is not there without a collision. If two skilled people can fight with full flaps in a stall fight in distances ranging from 50 yds to 200 yds for hours without colliding, there is something to be said about that. Why should someone be penalized for a ram if he did not see it on his end? Clearly there is skill in avoiding collisions, why should he be penalized for avoiding collisions when the other guy is not skilled enough to do so? And before you say that he should be penalized for fighting too close, please reread my example about how skilled pilots can fight for hours without colliding.
So to sum it up, just because shooting and collisions are technically "inconsistent", as you put it, each one examined individually shows that the current system is the best way to do it. The inconsistency is absolutely immaterial when the intent is to make the game run as effectively as possible.