A quick impression that one gets from 'flying' late war US fighters in this game/sim is that they are all overweight buses; they may 'hit their numbers' eventually (well, except for the P-38 and the F6F), but they are uniformly sluggish and very hard to trim to level flight. And for Heaven's sake, don't ever change directions or it will take you several minutes to regain even a fraction of the speed you had. Compared to the late-war IJN and IJAAF fighters (the flight data for which is almost invariably 70 years old, and always reflect the factory fresh ideal that the historical record indicates was rarer than an honest military recruiter), they are at HUGE disadvantages.
We cannot know what the stick forces were on the Ki-84, we cannot find an appraisal of how much or how often you needed to trim the rudder of the N1K2 as speed varied, whether you needed to constantly fiddle with your radiator or mixture in the Ki 100 to keep from overheating or if the optimum prop pitch for all of these aircraft was always 3000rpm--all of which we do know and have in grossly exaggerated form with the late war US fighters.
Every time I hear that the Corsair was called the 'Ensign Eliminator' and uses that for justification for making it hard to fly and control, I want to puke. Isn't anyone else mystified that the Messerschmitt 109 is so much easier to take off and land in the game when it had a well-deserved reputation for being difficult to land or takeoff in any but the most ideal conditions? What about the P-40, another aircraft notorious for ground-looping if the pilot's attention wandered for a moment? Again, pretty easy to land and control compared to the US late-war fighters. These aircraft were never intended to land on a carrier in even a calm sea; that's a task a couple of orders of magnitude more difficult to accomplish, but US and British Naval aviators did it routinely in the Corsair in all kinds of sea states short of a typhoon.
The US Navy rejected the Mustang as a carrier aircraft because it was not sufficiently controllable at carrier landing speeds, and as for the Seafire...well, the RN lost many, many times more Seafires to landing accidents than to enemy action. Some of us would take that data as a clue that the Corsair was quite a bit more tractable than those aircraft, particularly at slower speeds (what? compared to the legendary Spitfire--which is what the wartime Seafire models were, with some modifications for hooks and so on). One should expect that the Corsair was overall, a more forgiving and less demanding aircraft than the Spitfire in most if not all regimes.
The issue is context; compared to their contemporaries, late war US fighters are depicted with painfully accuracy while their less documented contemporaries appear to be given the benefit of the doubt, even when the historical record shows the exact opposite.
cheers
horseback
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