To be honest, i don't mind reuniting the community. What i totally object to however is reuniting it by force and implementing an overnight lack of choice.
If the day dawned that i'd lose all that extra content in the form of maps, aircraft and loadouts, i'd simply stop flying IL2 altogether and just wait for SoW.
Not all user made content is high quality, but i'm always in favor of having choices. I don't mind having some low quality stuff thrown in, after all it's free and i can choose not to use it.
Same goes for multiplayer, it's the business of the server admins to decide what kind of gameplay they want on their server and take appropriate action. For example, if a server crew wants to run semi-accurate scenarios that balance historical accuracy with equal chances of winning for both teams, it's their job to design the mission in a way to do that and also to make sure they get the planeset correct. However, this is no different to what was happening before the user made content arrived.
You can have perfectly unbalanced or inaccurate scenarios and planesets with vanilla IL2 as well. Maybe even more so in fact, since you don't have the extra aicraft to balance things out and you end up with a very annoying dilemma: do we ommit team A's aicraft X, that was historically present in the battle, to balance the lack of team B's aircraft Y ,that was also historically used and can match X evenly but is missing from the vanilla version, or do we just bite the bullet and fly the mission with plane X reigning supreme over the rest of the planeset?
It's just that choices are many more today and some people get swamped by them, understandably so i might say. The solution to that however is not to take away features that in one form or another are enjoyed by half the community.
I'd be willing to bet that if the game was locked, hyperlobby would see a marked and very steep decline in the amount of people flying IL2. The community would not be reunited, it would simply shrink to half its size and the foundations set for some pretty bad blood to run, which is not very clever to do a few months before the release of the successor series.
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