well, i have not been flying for the entire time the il-2 series has been out, but I remember when the first shipment of Pacific Fighters came into a warehouse I was working at, I stood looking at that box for a long time, looked around at all the computer equipment, and though, "one day"
That day came 8 years later, when I had a crappy computer, and a 32bit video card, one frame pre 2 minuites,
There were a lot of F4F's that ploughed into the mountains of the new Guinea map, the Pilot career for the F4F mission, one frame of the cockpit, and next frame was it smoldering on the ground, but it looked great.
I took a month and a new video card to get any part of the game to run, even FMB. and even then, it was 8 years of crappy small monitors and 15fps, lower when I was engaged.
Now, I have a 32 inch monitor, a 1gig video card, and know what a Conf.ini is, and how to manipulate it to get the best performance, or visuals. Have Free Track working fine, (but never use it), and still the same joysticks from back then. A Attack3 as my main stick, and a interactive Raider Pro for a throttle rudder.
And I can't hit a thing, last missions, two maps of the AleXserver, about a hour and a half, and my gun stats were 1 hit out of 600+ bullets fired. And that is par for the course.
I don't know if it's latency, or online timing is different, but offline, I can hit almost everything I shoot at, and shoot in the 3% range w fighters and 12% with bombers.
But, shooting down A.I. is no fun, not even good practice it seems.
But I can Land and take off like a pro, and have many hours of chute time. And I am making who ever shoots me down happy, so there's that.
Lets hope 4.14 brings some players back, though if your in north america, and have the days free, the Russians are still playing like crazy, AlexServer has 20-30 people every day at 11-2pm east coast time, and the Il-2 official server, Front Skies (full switch with icons) has about the same.
here is a list of servers, with the Russian ones as well. Ignore the pilot count for the last two, it is wrong.
http://il2.com.ru/en/links.php
Cheers!