Splitter, there was a large debate about this a few months ago, when some of us were asking about clickable cockpits. The reason people were interested was simple: there are not enough keyboard shortcuts to properly simulate the amount of controls a real pilot operates, or more accurately, we just can't remember them all
Imagine for example, if you wanted to finetune your intercoolers to control your carburetor temperature and you had to remember keybindings like ctrl+shift+H+[ to lower it and ctrl+shift+H+] to raise it.
Naturally, this brought about the question of wheter so much realism was needed in a combat sim, with good points made either way, but no official word on the matter.
Sometime later however, the guys from the French check-six simulation community arranged a visit to Moscow to interview Mr. Maddox and see some of the work done. That's where the answers came from. If you read the interview, you'll notice that a lot of these things did in fact make it in the feature list. If i remember correctly, in one case a Ju87 was climbing and as it went higher the canopy fogged up, until the person flying turned on the defoggers and it cleared again, insanely realistic stuff like that.
As for photo recon missions, agent drops and the like, it's a matter of mission building triggers. I think that even if they are not included upon release, the engine will still be capable of them. If the IL-2 mission builder can be upgraded to use triggers by team daidalos, i doubt that the next generation sim will lack them.
In case you missed it, here's the interview from the check-six website:
http://www.checksix-fr.com/articles/...g_foxy_EN.html