Why not have the best of both worlds? If the game is modular by design (think FSX but with more control by the developers on what gets included, because we need a common basis for online play) then enthusiasts will be able to create new planes and submit them to the dev team ready for FM/DM testing and tweaking, they will save them time and give us more aircraft. And nobody will have to hack anything if the tools are there for the job and the game engine supports an open architecture.
I really don't see any harm in that. In fact, it might mean a couple of years ahead of schedule arrival of your favotire theatres for all of you pacific and late war fans.
The challenge is to make an engine that can accurately compute flight models based on the aircraft's shape and design. Of course that's too much for our PCs to handle with all the bells and whistles of a modern sim and that's why most flight models use ready made tables and approximation. However, maybe a developing tool could do that...you design a plane load it into Oleg's wind tunnel software and it calculates the FM for you ready to be imported in the sim as a new flyable. For one, i would love to see clickable pits at some point and WWII era nav aids and blind bombing devices.
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