It's ok to like different things.
I could just as easily claim that people who declare the new features to be mere fluff have an agenda to keep the rest of us flying IL2 for as long as possible, so that they can keep their favorite servers populated while engaging in their preferred form of flight simming, instead of having the majority of the community gradually move to a platform they dislike/can't bother to learn/whatever, but i won't.
I'll just chalk it up to them liking different aspects of the whole flying thing and let them do their thing in peace
As far as i and my personal entertainment are concerned though i can't put my voice behind design decisions that i firmly consider to be steps of regression, especially when we have new features dealing with some very real limitations of aircraft operation and this creates a new set of challenges and tactical situations for me to master.
On one hand i have a new and varied environment of evolving gameplay where i can learn more about a subject i like, on the other i have the choice of sticking with something that will accommodate past acquired habits of mine to ensure a greater rate of success. And this is pretty much a subjective choice, depending on what makes each one of us tick.
Well, i'm not really putting my life at risk here like those pilots did back in the day, so as far as i'm personally concerned i say success be damned, i want to learn some new stuff about aircraft of the day and how they operated, flew and fought, not pretend to be a top ace while simu-flying with 1/10th of a real pilot's workload. I'm not dissing it but it's not for me, so i'm very glad i got a sim that focuses on the kind of aspect i like. It can be too much for some people, sure, but that's what the difficulty options are there for.
EDIT: I missed Alvinfolk's post (we must have been typing simultaneously), so let me address it here. Rest assured, whatever is modeled in CoD is not about going through the motions. Some stuff doesn't work properly yet but it's in the list of documented issues to fix and when it does it will have a big impact on gameplay.
Example, the Blenheim's hydraulic selector is modeled but automatic, because it's something that the pilot uses maybe twice in the course of the entire mission. The hydraulic pump can't run gear and flaps at the same time as the turret and it's prone to overheating, so what they did was use a three-way switch: off when cruising, set to drive the gear and flaps during takeoff and landing, set to power the turret when nearing enemy airspace. That's why the turret doesn't work when the engines are off and we are sitting on the ground. This however is something that CoD handles on its own without input from the player, once i'm airborne my turret works fine because the sim sets the hydraulics for me.
The fuel controls though? Entirely different story and there are very good reasons they are modeled. Got a fuel leak? You'll get asymmetric weight distribution and since it doesn't have aileron trim you can be potentially stuck in an unrecoverable roll. What do you do then? You jettison some fuel from the "heavy" wing. This is a control we're currently missing in the sim, so we're actually missing features that have an impact on gameplay and not the other way around.
Or let's assume that the weight difference is not that big and the aircraft is controllable even when all the fuel on one side of the wing has leaked out. How do you keep that engine running? That's what the third fuel selector is for, it enables cross-feed so that you can feed both engines from the tanks on one side of the wing.
There are many examples like these and i'm sure that in a future expansion people will be grateful that they will be able to first burn the fuel from the rear tank that upsets their center of gravity when flying a P-51, instead of having them all drain at a similar rate and fly in a spin prone condition like we have to do in IL2