Older games had a lot of extras, because processing power was low and they couldn't show off with the ingame engine. For example, if i'm not mistaken there were promotion and medal animations in Red Baron but not in Red Baron II.
It seems that while games became more realistic looking during the actual gameplay, a lot of things that were there to spice things up got omitted. The best extras in Dynamix games (red baron, aces of the pacific, aces over europe) was the menu screens detailing squadron life, the progress in the front lines, the top aces chart, the ability to request a transfer, 1 on 1 duels with an ace and painting your biplane to the color of your choice.
In EAW, the best thing was the believable AI. Sure, IL2 might have a more advanced AI but they do some pretty silly things every now and then. In EAW i even saw that wingmen of different skill levels were also different in how they they followed me. A novice would lose track of you and fall back sometimes in the heat of the action and rejoin a while later, while a veteran would be glued to you while you were going through maneuvers.
The best thing however when interacting with the AI was the detailed chatter, straight out of a movie, and the fact that you could issue some really complex orders that actually worked 90% of the time. I had a USAAF career going on starting as a lowly lieutenant and getting promoted to captain just as the first mustangs got delivered.
Let me tell you, there's nothing better for a flight leader in an offline campaign to split your 12-plane squad into 3 different flights around the bombers, send one into an aggressive sweep ahead, have another one in close escort and take your last flight of 4 ponies in top cover duty where you can monitor the whole affair. The AI wingmen followed orders so well that in many occasions i would go high and direct them towards totally annihilating the opposition, long after i had expended my ammunition (especially when intercepting bombers in a 190, a lot of times we could wipe out an entire box of 32 bombers).
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