I still think Cliffs Of Dover should have had a 'Perfect' graphic mode like the original IL-2 series.
There were lots of people who happily played the original series without even trying to play with 'Perfect' settings, and it took years sometimes for hardware to come out that was capable of pushing some of the effects in 'Perfect' mode. But at least people knew what the deal was, and the game still looked alright in 'Normal' mode.
I think 'Cliffs Of Dover' just wasn't scalable enough in the same way. The hardware on release (CPU and GPU) wasn't powerful enough to brute force good frame-rates at the best settings when there was a lot of action happening, but turning settings down quickly made the game look substandard.
As I remember it, they did optimize the graphics engine bit by bit, partially by removing some effects. Then eventually they basically re-wrote the whole thing altogether. But after that they never put back in some of the effects they'd removed along the way. And that's what we were left with.
Pretty sure they never changed the flight model to make landing easier, but they did stop the needles in the control panel instruments from fluttering, which was most noticeable when landing. I think they might have toned down the overall cockpit shaking as well, which might have made landing seem easier at least. And of course the positive G engine cut-out was toned down, which might also have made landing easier in some cases.
As someone who had a decent system and was willing to play the game within it's limits, I too think the game was more immersive in its earlier form and have lots of good memories of flying around in it. Don't want to dwell on it though.
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