The major culprit of the smoke obscuring view is the cannons. You can not change the loadout in anyway to reduce smoke. I have no tracers in my cannon loadout as every round is a tracer and smokes too much.
Yes, I agree my drop in framerate is and should be attributed to my older laptop. I am unaware of any possibility to "upgrade" my GPU. I also am told by Cyberpower, Clevo, and Corsair that I can't upgrade my RAM.
The complete obscuring of a target due to essentially firing smoke grenades is a game problem. The smoke needs to be turn down, dissipate faster, or no spread so much in order to not impact pilot visibility.