If modding was the same as cheating there wouldn't be so many modded servers attracting some of the top fliers in the community. If modding was so bad, Oleg wouldn't work to integrate modding support in SoW and he wouldn't hand-pick some of the most talented modders to help him with SoW (his words, not mine, in the simHQ interview again).
For me, the distinction is very simple. The process of modding was a dangerous path, but the results were positive for the most part. I no longer have to fly a Me109E over the Gulf of Finland against Spit MkVs and pretend i'm over the channel fighting against Spit MkIs. I can fly over a map that's the real channel (ok it's scaled down a bit but still it's better than Finland) and see the correct aircraft types around me.
A lot of people who stopped flying IL2 some years ago, finally went out and bought 1946 just for this and got back in the game. Because, no matter how good the graphics, FM or DM, what matters the most in the end is having the tools to recreate as many scenarios and tactical possibilities as possible. That's why modded servers are more popular, you can do things on them that can't be done on the stock ones. I have seen formations of heavy bombers with fighter cover, flying the correct mission profile and using tactics as accurate as can be in a computer game, and all were flown by real human pilots that i had to outsmart to stop them from reaching their targets.
That's the big selling point for any sim really, the ability to recreate more than just the aircraft. That's why sims with just one flyable have become classics, like Falcon4 and Black Shark, that's why a lot of people think RoF is incomplete and that's why the mods are popular. No matter how good your FM is, if there's not a sufficiently well done rendition of the war around the player you're simply flying an FSX clone and not a combat sim. Of course that's a matter of taste, many people are happy with the FM/DM alone, but there's also a lot who enjoy seeing the entire theater of war in motion.
I'm really happy that Oleg's team is trying to go the traditional route and give us something like that, an experience that will be as complete as our processing power allows and maybe even more than that, right from the box.
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