I went back and reread your post, ProPilot, and from my viewpoint, you missed a few things.
Base capture you feel is an important part of the game. For some people, yes, for others, not in the least.
You said base captures should require teamwork........again, for some yes, others, no.
Right now, and for a long time now, base captures can be accomplished quite easily, IMO, too easily.
All that is required is to spawn a GV or two, roll towards the town, take out the town guns, blow up a few buildings, and base capture complete. What makes it too easy in my opinion is that the GV are all but invisible due to the overgrowth of vegetation and the ridiculous icon range. I don't know how many bases I've seen lost purely because the defenders could not see the GV's, even when they were right over them.
Keep in mind that this is my perspective and opinion only, I speak for myself alone. Different folks want to see different things in the game, thus the varied responses.
Like Eagler, I would be fine with the game going back to it's roots, being focused on air to air. I don't want to see the ground side cancelled out completely, however, as there were tanks and such from the early days, too.
What would interesting to try, thought it would require quite a bit of adjustment, would be change the spawn points. Vbase to vbase or ports only. The GV crowd has been resistant to discussion of changing the icon ranges, so my thought is let them play among themselves. Several have expressed that they don't do well in planes, so they do GV's. Some of us don't do well in GV's, we prefer aircraft. Their crutch of near invisibility via trees and reduced icons gives them an unfair (again, my opinion) advantage in the game. Checked last tour's stats, at one time a few of them had 34:1 k/d ratios........that levelled down to around 24:1 by tour's end.
Like I told HT the other day, I would never load a bomb on my plane, rarely did in the early days, if I didn't have to deal with GV's spawning in instantly from miles away. I would be glad to let them have their fun, leave me alone to have my fun, if they stayed away from air bases. ND Isles was a perfect example this past weekend. Tons of air battles, didn't have to concern myself losing a base to a GV spawning from several sectors away across bodies of water. It was like the old days, with fewer numbers. ND Isles has the GV playground in the middle, and while they can spawn to other bases, it's not across water to another land mass.
No matter what we say here, the game is gonna go in the direction that HT chooses. Does he read and consider ideas put forward? Probably so, the problem is, we rarely get his feedback. That is his prerogative, as the largest investment in the game has been by himself.
Anyway, rant mode off. Gonna be interesting to read "the future" of the game.
