Guys, we're going around in circles here while things are dead simple:
a) 1C had a set amount of money to spent and a finite amount of people to work on a new project.
b) They could either do the same solid stuff that they had done in the past or try and add something new in it, but there was not enough money over time and people to do both at the same time.
c) They decided to do the difficult part first and lay down the foundation for the new stuff, then add the rest they already knew how to do from their past work as time goes by, simply because it's easier to do it in that order rather than the other way around.
If you build the game engine so that it works like IL2:1946 and missions can use up to 1000 objects,it's difficult to modify the engine at a later date to include CEM and load 15000 objects in a single mission.
If you do it the other way around and build an engine that is modular and can support a lot of objects, you can release it with some placeholder modules and then start adding to it as time goes by without having to once again code the basic engine in the future.
It's exactly what's happening as we speak: new graphics and new sounds are coming, sometime later we'll get new water and dynamic weather, etc. You can't just cram a new module into a game engine if it's not built from scratch to support certain features. If it was possible they would have just modified the old IL2 engine and not spend time and money to create a new one, since they didn't i guess it's not possible.
It was a choice between "let's build something that we can add to over the years at the cost of some technical troubles early on" vs "let's build the same thing we did in the past with better graphics and have it working right out of the box".
They went with the first choice and i'm absolutely thankful for that, i can't spend another 10 years flying in a sim where people can abuse their airframes and engines as they see fit for no penalty and all aircraft perform to the top of their capabilities without any reflection as to how hard it was in reality to make them perform that way. And in return for a departure from those habits during the lifespan of the series, i'm willing to take a few months of initial teething troubles.
It's that simple, new and untested vs repeating tried and tested stuff, some people prefer one method and some prefer the other.
By the way, i'm not pulling random numbers out of my head here. The map running on the ATAG server has 15000-20000 objects and 5000 of them are flak guns (ask Bliss about it if you don't believe me).
Good luck even getting a mission to load with so many AI units in another simulator, much less play through it.
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