Nice post - full of nostalgia.
The fact is that immersion was better worked - a real weak point of 1c series.
However, flight model and AI were rather primitive on this game due to the lack of resource left after the processor has worked all the animations for the atmosphere of the game. On the contrary IL2 was more dedicated to make you feel what it was to be alone in a pit during a thrilling dogfight.
If I agree that your idea is rather good I think that 1C has alrdy over worked the graphics for now in CoD.
But I like the tracers
~S