Excuse me?
What is the crutch, exactly? I suppose then having a Hispano-Suiza gun as a unit to be placed into the functionality of a plane is a "crutch." Instead, every plane built for SOW should force the guy making that plane to have to make an entirely unique engine, weapon system, etc., instead of reusing them like IL-2 does.
That's a "loadout."
Everything in the game is just a piece of code, pointed to someplace. A plane looks like a fighter, and functions like one because it has an engine pointed to in the fmd file. Planes with the same engine share the same emd (engine) file. Guess that's a "crutch."
If you want proper recon missions for things like online wars, you need a camera "weapon." The game actually has LOS (trees, buildings, etc have a collider), so you can easily make a weapon that shoots like a shotgun—if the plane used lateral cameras, the "gun" would be pointed in the right direction, with the spread pattern of the "shotgun" matching the FOV of the camera. Any targets (side based) that are hit by the invisible shotgun get marked on a map the game keeps internally. It can then use this to generate follow up missions.
DCG uses road networks and abstracted forces to move the front along, this is a similar tool, but creates the possibility for player interaction in the recon process.
Inability to "think outside the box" is the primary reason we have stale content.
Building a perfect replica plane isn't enough.
People who work on this stuff should take a break from computer games and play old wargames for a while. There is much goodness there to borrow.
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