I think this polarization is getting old. It's neither the criticism nor the admiration that's annoying, that's natural, expected and should be expressed. It's the
way some people go about expressing it, thinking they are the holders of the universal truth and turning everything into a black and white discussion: "it will be awful", "no it won't, it will be the second coming of baby Jesus", "you fanboy!", "you hater!"
My personal opinion? It won't be bad, it won't be perfect, it will be
balanced in its content and with today's medium spec PCs in mind, but will also give you the tools to do more
if you have the hardware.
Also, how about some perspective? We are comparing a sim in its infancy with other sims that have already been running for a few years, that is, the lifetimes of each one are different and this skews the comparisons because in a constantly updated product bigger lifetime=more development time in total.
You can't compare today's CoD with today's IL2 or today's RoF because of the above reason and you can't compare today's IL2 and RoF with the CoD of 2-5 years in the future because we don't have time machines.
What we can do is compare sims
at similar points during their life and within the content of that time.
So let's take a look at that:
CoD on release:
Around 12 flyables
A lot of AI units (air, sea and ground)
Mission builder which keeps the old interface to help us churn out missions fast, along with some improvements
Scripted campaigns
Various enhancements over what is a well known previous series from a well known developer team, which makes it easy to quantify the changes and gives an idea of what to expect (FM/DM, engine management, AI, graphics and sounds,etc)
Very popular subject, even if done in the past by many others
IL2 on release (the original in 2001):
A good amount of flyables (don't remember the exact number, i think it was 7-8 main types per side if we don't count the sub-variants)
Sufficient number of AI units
Mission builder which at the time was totally non-intuitive and totally different from the kind of interface one would expect
Scripted campaigns
Totally unkown product/developer at that time
Completely unknown subject matter (eastern front)
RoF on release (the original, not the Iron Cross Edition relaunch):
Four flyables
Four AI aircraft, plus a couple of each type of ground unit per side
Capable mission builder which at the time of release nobody could get around, lack of documentation for mission builder
Campaign was a random string of missions downloaded from a master server where the player's flight of 5 would invariably meet an enemy flight of 2-3 and if you strayed off the path a bit you might trigger a recon 2-seater, its duration was not selectable and it would often give unrealistic and non-historical encounters, especially after the add-on DLC planes were released, for example: you are flying a Nieuport 17 in late 1917 and you meet up with some Fokker DVIIs
Developer known from some work in the IL2 community (i think they made DF server admin tools for IL2), but other than that nobody knew much of them
Known subject but niche-within-a-niche in a way (everyone knows about WWI but most people fly WWII or jets)
See what i just did there? I used common sense.
So my mystical arcane powers of logical deduction, granted to me after i sacrificed a trainload's worth of virgins (what? it's obvious such powers are in short supply around here!), tell me that if IL2 and RoF are still going, then CoD will do at least just as well, if not better
