imho, when Luthier said that the tracers look perfect, I think he wanted people to stop whining about such small detail in that thread. to be quite honest, at that moment I also thought it to be nitpicking and complete waste of time to bitch about it. but when people start to take statements like Luthier's as axiom, without any backing of it... then it's time to start asking questions, no matter how dumb or annoying they might seem. I had some experience with firing the tracers from AK47 during my military service, but I wouldn't call myself an expert on the matter, since that wasn't aerial gunnery. and yes, they looked as group of bright dots in the daylight, without elongated light streaks effect. but, I might be wrong there. where I'm almost positive that I'm not wrong is this:
if we have a random tracer bullet whose construction usually is like this:
meaning, that the tracer mixture is in the recess of it's base. so now, how come that we can see product of that mixture burning when bullet is fired in our direction in COD movies? wouldn't that defy the better part of tracer's purpose?