To be honest, i think a lot of people focus on labels instead of the real scope of a game such as CoD.
Sure, it won't be as current-tech as an FPS and the reasons are numerous yet simple:
- completely different scope and scale in everything that pertains to the gameplay experience, from map sizes to amount of units populating it, etc, etc
- much longer and complicated development cycle, it had to be released at some point so yes, it's going to lag somewhat behind...otherwise we get feature creep with more and more stuff to do in development and it never gets released...this is my major source of laughter with some of the people who complain the loudest, not all, but a lot of them are the same people who were telling them to hurry up and release it
- small budgets, small market share, small development teams
I think i don't even have to go on.
This is the state of things, nothing more, nothing less and to be honest with you, i'm not bothered because it puts the emphasis first and foremost on what should be the heart of a flight sim. They could ship it with IL2's graphic engine for all i care as long as it had those elements. Ok, i'm exaggerating here, but you get my drift, graphics are not the main attraction for such a game. They are not trivial either and neither is sound as they are both tools to create immersion, they just don't take first place because there's a lot of equally important stuff to include. In that sense, if they don't reach perfection they should be functional to enable everything else to work.
Once revenue starts coming in, it's better optimized to run well on a wide range of PCs and the extra content starts arriving (payware or not, official or 3rd party), things will pick up speed.
The bugs will gradually be squashed, the FMs will be corrected and even the graphics could improve over time, especially as DX11 GPU prices drop and more people can afford one. It does make sense to take into account the fact that not everyone can afford dual 6970s at this point in time.
This is not catering to the lowest common denominator, it's catering to a well-rounded medium and it's once again a function of the fact that we are a tiny part of the gamer demographic that has to fund some of the most complicated and expensive to make games that also have a long shelf-life. If you are making a sim and you want to secure enough sales to keep the project going you don't make it DX11 exclusive at this point in time, it's as simple as that.
I'm not disputing the benefits of DX11 in terms of offloading computation to the GPU, in fact it's something that will let us have even better performance down the line and not just on graphics, but on physics-related calculations which matter the most in a flight sim. What i'm disputing is that everyone who currently owns the sim would rush to buy a DX11 GPU it this game was DX11 exclusive. And to make it clearer, by exclusive i don't mean that it would have to be truly exclusive.
Simply having realism-enhancing features that need DX11 to work would divide the online community in DX11 enabled servers that, for example, would run dynamic calculations on how the wing bends under fire and how that affects the FM and non-DX11 ones that don't: a couple of tick-boxes in the server's realism settings and bye-bye online compatibility.
This is the same thing that happened with the original IL2 in the past. High detail clouds made it harder (and more realistic) to spot aircraft in them, but most servers were running with them switched off because not enough people could take the FPS hit at that time. The end result what that running with high detail clouds left you at a disadvantage to someone with a lower-spec PC that had them disabled: he could see targets in clouds just fine, you couldn't.
It's clear that due to the type of constraints mentioned above, it was a choice between state of the art rendering techniques and building an engine that will provide more simulator-specific elements. Sure, the CEM is broken at high altitude, but i'd rather have a broken CEM that will get patched to accuracy over time than have it ship as a remake of IL2 with crysis-quality graphics and none of the aircraft related stuff we got.
This is what the game aims to do first and foremost, simulate the way an aircraft flies. You won't see me complaining in a shooter forum because they don't have strategy elements, so i can't comprehend how people can focus so much on graphics alone and completely miss the fact that not just the aim of the game, but it's actual defining quality is something entirely different.
If it comes down to a choice between what makes a simulator a simulator and state of the art graphics, it's only natural graphics will take a back seat otherwise it won't be a simulator anymore.
Again, i'm not saying everything is perfect or that people don't have a right to disagree, of course they do. I just have a feeling a lot of people are expecting CoD to have the type of priorities that are the hallmark of completely different genres, that's all.
Sure, it's not perfect and not everything works like it should, far from it. Its saving grace is that it has the appropriate feature set and priorities for a game of the simulator genre, it just needs these features to be corrected so that they work as advertised.