Your oversight is that you view this as an isolated IL2 community affair. There's loads more money to be had from a sim that implements advanced systems management. How long do you think the FSX crowd will be able to keep their sim alive now that ACES studio is closed? Where will they go? The only other alternatice is Xplane and while their FMs are better than FSX, they lack in other departments and there's also a sort of rivarly between FSX and Xplane pilots. Fun fact in all of that, is that many real world airline pilots practice the next day's route on laptops during their flights, in either of those two sims while the co-pilot is monitoring the airplane during the "autopilot transit" phase, there are training schools that use FSX as a training tool and there's also a version of X-plane that is FAA certified for use in pilot training.
The point is, a market for these things is way bigger than "a vocal minority of IL2 users" as you put it. If something new is going to get the piece of the cake that FSX had, it might as well be SoW. More money for Oleg's team, more people working on the SoW expansions, everyone wins.
Will that be enough for these features to make it into the release of SoW? I seriously doubt it and i don't expect it. What most of us are campaigning for is a gradual introduction of such features during the simulator's life. And if someone doesn't like it, be my guest and lower your difficulty settings to what you're comfortable with in IL2, no problem, everyone's happy
