I agree that IL-2 seemed WAAAY ahead of its time. It looks good even now and with some mods, nobody would ever guess that the game is 10 years old. Bf1942 is something like that too
Now I have a problem, after experiencing CoD I just cant get back to IL-2, as it feels arcad-ish compared to it in CEM, flight and damage models. Yet, being too lazy and unimaginative to mess with FMB, I cant find much to do in CoD except furball all the time in QMB (which is much worse than IL-2 QMB). In IL-2 those little dynamic campaigns were simple but did the job for me. I wish they could be ported over somehow.