It would be a great feature, because it would give the single-player pilot incentives to go on revenge trips and fuel virtual rivalries. For example, imagine getting sufficient rank to be allowed lone-wolfing, or maybe drawing up your own freijagd/rhubarb missions amidst the campaign generated ones. You would go over your guncam films and try to pinpoint the unit, raid their airfield and provoke the other guy to come up and meet you until you could exact revenge, cinematographic things like that.
It would be a so-so feature if you needed to replay an epic mission where you got 4 kills before running out of ammo, chewed up the tail off the 5th kill with your prop and then bailed out, before meeting a sadistic AI pilot that kills your ingame character, forcing you to replay the sortie or lose your campaign.
It would also be an awful feature because of the rants it would cause. I give it less than a month from release before people start openly debating the frequency of sadist AI appearances per nationality, and we all know this would probably end up in a big case of "nazis only did it" vs "everyone did it to an extent" vs "allies never did it" vs "everyone except my country's noble fighters did it"
Never the less, Feathered always comes up with good ideas gameplay-wise, i just don't see it making the release because of the reasons stated in the previous paragraph. Maybe we could work on this theme of revenge and personal investment without being too "politically incorrect" and come up with something else?
Also, the expanded AI attributes idea is simply brilliant.