you can look up the evidence as easy as I can.
From personal experience, in almost every late war pac setup in the CT, the N1K2 is either heavily perked from the beginning, or it gets perked or stashed away in the rear due to whining. In every late war Pac setup, what happens is the Japanese evade BnZ passes all day long. That's it (and well, that's how it should be if you want to be historical.) Not many people want to fly on the evading side of that coin. Every once in awhile, you can fly a Tony against a Hellcat who will fight you. Don't bother flying a Zeke in the setup though. The Cats and Hogs just BnZ you, and if you get on top of them, they dive and run. Like I said, that's what they should do. It's not fun though from the Zeke perspective. It's pretty fun to completely dictate the terms of the fight from the Allied perspective. (oh this setup gets downright asinine when they add in the Spit or Hurricane as FAA or Australian units.)
What Batz says about late war IJN setups is almost always true. They end up with mostly blue planes buzzing some japanese planes. As soon as a couple of Ki-61s come in with alt, the USN planes run for their CV, which is almost always just right off shore.
Then you have the Philippines setups with land grabbing... P-38Ls and P-47D-25 or -30's with gobs of ordnance, vs the Japanese who don't have much of any JABO ability. Add to that the Hellcat which is CV borne which the Japanese have no counter for (CV JABO wise, I mean) and the USA has a tremendous base porking advantage.
That is what happens in late war Pac setups. The N1K2 isn't ALWAYS whined away, sometimes it's perked away from the start. However, excepting in that Kurils setup, the George always ends up perked or limited to the rear fields (that's a far distance in the Philippines map too.)
Yeah, the Hog got whined away and the Tony with it. Show where I said they didn't whine them away. Personally, the Hogs I saw in the Slot on that day were not that dangerous to me at all. They just went straight in, followed the 30 degree rule, and went straight back out. They'd come back around 5 minutes later. Not that much of an annoyance. Yeah, if you didn't see one, it'd ruin your day (if they can make the shot that is!) Not one of them did an out of plane manuever to maintain their energy and try to achieve a firing position. It was all straight BnZ.
BTW, slightly off topic, but you guys really underestimate the value of the FM-2. It can easily hang with a Yak9-T in a 1 v 1, and not just in a turn fight. It can hang in the vertical with the Yak. I fought Eddiek in his FM-2 and me in a Yak9-T. He (and that Cat) impressed the hell out of me in the fight. I underestimated that plane, and he handed me my arse.
