I could imagine that IL-2 will survive among squads using IP-to-IP networking without HL: takes the guesswork out of who shows up and limits it to people who are invited. It will certainly have a life on my LAN. I got the game some time ago for a friend's son, but then it turned out their machine could not handle it, so it went on an old machine of mine that is Athlon instead of Celeron that they had
Not sure if I will ever fly all the flyables before BoB comes out, but its one of the very cool aspects of the game that keeps my interest
Cheers
Triad