That's the way i see it too.
Was i disappointed with the state of the sim on release: Yes
Is anyone else making a new WW2 prop-sim engine: No
Can any other engine support as many objects (static/AI) on a map and actual programming to make your own dynamic environments: Not to this extent (a guy on simHQ populated the CoD map with about 2000 objects all over both coastlines and it was running the same as when the map was empty on his rig)
Does any other game give you a big enough map AND a representative selection of flyables for the scenario for this cost: No, the trend of the day is to buy everything separately.
And since something's got to give, in all walks of life, in this case it gave in in terms of performance/stability due to last minute rushing to publish the software or scrap the whole thing. What the sim does took up so much money and time, that something else ha to suffer for it and be added in at a later date.
It could have been different but something would still have to give. We might have had a stable sim from the start but have to buy planes individually, or have a smaller map, or an engine that can't handle more than a couple hundred simultaneous objects in a mission.
It's not desirable but it's understandable for everyone who is willing to go a little bit beyond "i want now" mentality and see the big picture. Sure, i want everything too and i want it to work 100%. But i'm not going to act like there's nothing else offered to keep me busy in the meantime, because it clearly is and it just so happens to be the exact features i had hoped for. Maybe they're not fully polished, but the part of the code dealing with them is already part of the game's engine, which is much better than having to shoe-horn them in at a later date.
So, it's also a matter of personal priorities. For me things like AA are the least of my issues. If they came to me and told me "hey man, we'll do the patches in the order you say", i would tell them:
"Visual quality is good enough, if it's performing well too then stop working on it for the next 6 months. Then give me a bit of documentation for the libraries so i can start making some C# scripts, fix the FMs,improve the CEM and fix all bugs in the logic of aircraft controls/systems so that we can fly what we have."
Sadly though, for a technical oriented crowd like we flight simmers are, there's a whole lot of "FPS-style benchmarking obsession" going on which leads to missing the big picture. Nothing wrong with other gaming genres, i play TF2 all the time. But the priorities of making one type of game are not the same as making another one.
I want to work on a project for a dynamic campaign some point during this year. I want the mission script to check if my airfield has enough fuel, then top up my tanks and remove that from the airfield's total. When i come back and land i want the remaining fuel to be added to the total. When the airfield is low on fuel, either due to attacks or normal use, i want it to trigger an AI convoy that will bring fuel from the fuel dump to the airfield. If the convoy is attacked and destroyed then sooner or later it's no fuel for you mr. player, spawn at a different airfield.
In other words, i want to make a supply system that will make what you do online matter. And the engine gives me the tools to do it. So, you can understand how much of a shame it is that these tools are undocumented because through all these months apart from the valid performance and stability complaints, the rest have been requests for purely aesthetic aspects like the nature of tracers or a couple of jaggy aerials.
Sure, visuals and sound are an integral part of the immersion process. So is having a proper environment to fly in though, otherwise we would all be looking at photos of warbirds to get our fix.
Excuse my disappointment, but the amount of people who miss the big picture of
a) what the sim tried to achieve and
b) how the complexity of that goal is actually the cause of its problems
is too damn high.