You bring up good points, but what Oleg is trying to do (might be the photographer background there) is recreate the lighting and colours your eye sees in real life as opposed to a colour-corrected/altered version you'd see in the movies or other games.

The point of him taking that direction (I'm guessing) is that if you have a somewhat realistic starting point or "base" then you can more easily move from there. If he created COD with all the settings and tricks that WOP has then it would be much harder for someone to get it to look like FSX or X-Plane, or any other "non-styled/colour-corrected" sim. It's a lot eaiser to add in the vingette or the heavy-handed colour-correction, or the fog seen in WOP than it is to try and remove it.

It's all up to people's preferences, and it seems that most people like what Oleg is going for rather than what WOP already has. I'm not knocking WOP. It does what it wants to really well, but I'm guessing most simmers interested in the type of sim COD is shaping up to be want what Oleg has in mind for the visuals.

As for the visuals/style/colour-corrections found in WOP and Saving Private Ryan, that was just a rough comparison. After SPR was released a lot of people probably thought that real-life colour wasn't as vibrant as it is today. When I look out the window of a small aircraft I don't usually see a "pea-soup" film over everything like I do when playing WOP or watching a SPR.

You're entitled to your opinion, and so am I. But it looks like Oleg and I are on the same page given the direction the screen shots have been/are going.