Exactly! Wonderful isn't it? ;) We here in this forum want this sim so bad that a vast majority will gladly be "fooled" into spending $100+ to get "the full Monty" (why are we here for years otherwise?)... If the "kids"/regular users get "tricked" into buying "too much" Maddox Games will get more money and we win in the long term as Oleg will continue in this niche and not focus on cameras or dive tours in the Black Sea... M'kay?

Exactly. There are many reasons i didn't jump on the RoF wagon and it's not so much about the money. What this business model does is fragment the base content pool of the game to the point where it hinders multiplayer and accurate representation of the game's intended setting.

Like i said before, i have no problem paying for stuff. I just prefer paying $50 for a full expansion with maps, flyables and AI aircraft than paying $5 a piece for individual flyables only. It makes for too much of a "disjointed" feel of the game for my taste and a lack of a common ground.

Your mileage may vary of course. Also, this is not a problem for RoF yet because it's still light on the amount of aircraft it models. What i'm really interested to see is what happens a couple of years down the line, when they'll have enough planes to span the entire WWI timeframe sold separately.

I can't help but imagine myself joining a server and having the full complement of 1917 aircraft and a few 1916 ones, flying 2-3 missions and then it switches to a 1915 planeset...Ooooops, i didn't buy any 1915 planes. Let's disconnect and try another one.
Notice here that i'm also discounting the fact that the server pool for each one of us is a bit limited, since out of 50 servers there may be 10 that run our preferred difficulty settings, but let's keep it simple for argument's sake. I fly 4-5 missions again and wham, a mission with a 1915 planeset comes up. I have to disconnect and jump to another server again.

So, after a couple of days of this i cave in and buy a couple of 1915 planes that are on a promo offer. I have no guarantee that these 2 planes out of a total of maybe 10 or more will be used in the mission next time i go online. So, i have to probably end up buying more than half of the year's planeset to make sure i have something to fly.

Multiply this with the amount of different servers running different difficulty settings, missions, planesets and preferences of the people who fly there and it gets more complicated than modded IL2 really fast.

Highly possible forum post: "omg, this biplane is so uber for a 1915 planeset, let's not include it in the missions from now on"...too bad if you bought just that one. Also, how about everyone buying the hot rod planes and nobody flying the others?
Sooner or later, this business model ends up with most people flying the same aircraft (either the "uber" planes or the ones that are frequently used in most missions) and doing the same tasks all the time.

IL2's system was and still is the best for flight sims: as much of a complete theater/timeframe as possible depicted per each expansion. And if you think the time of free flyables has gone by never to return ok, let's only have payware flyables. Just not one at a time.

What a sim needs to build a community that will make it a success, is the necessary tools to recreate history in a reasonably priced package. IL2 had it and that's why it was and still is a success. Are you an offliner? No problem, there's hundreds of campaigns to download. Are you an onliner? There's loads of servers with varied missions to fly on.
None of this would be possible however if each piece of the puzzle was sold separately because NOBODY would have the exact same pieces as anybody else, so nobody would bother making content for a game if he couldn't be sure about sharing it with the other fans.

Sure, i might end up paying for aircraft that i would rarely fly on my own with this system, but it unties the mission builder's hands to use more obscure and interesting types instead of the same old favorites, just because they can be sure that everyone has them installed.

The money issue can be solved by pricing each expansion appropriately. I could pay $50 either way, but i would take a $50 expansion with 10 flyables over 10 individual planes of $5 each on any given day and the reason is simple. It's not about the money, it's about the improved gameplay that ensues when everyone has extra choices.

Give us expansions instead of piecemeal bread crumbs here and there and SoW will succeed for the same reasons IL2 did.