Pony talk

[Madfish]

If you really wanted performance stats you could only reconstruct and benchmark the planes.

Blackdog you mention an important point. For example what if the saturation of certain planes would've been higher. I don't think it's always just about performance. In the end what probably mattered most was having aces to train the rooks, having a good supply chain, quality materials and fuel, pilots that are actually getting some rest and the right numbers.
During the late war Germany wouldn't even have been able to win if they had a couple of Eurofighters or Raptors or whatever. Since the pilots have basically been living zombies, most aces were dead, the material quality was low, fuel was low, training was almost impossible and the planes have been in bad shape.

So in single player missions you could balance things out a bit. But in multiplayer everyone will of course pick the best plane to fight. And the game will supply a perfect plane, the pilot will have slept properly, fed properly, not freezing, sitting comfortably at home and also all the experience he accumulates will add up at some point. Getting shot down is simply an addition to experience - it doesn't mean injury or death at all.

So yeah, sims can only simulate a few things. Most important things can't be simulated however. So it's a rather cumbersome discussion how well certain planes really were in the real war and how they're now in a game. Things are just not comparable at all I believe.