What needs to happen is an industry push to make an open battlefield. It would be an environment that developers could write to, which allowed something like Steel Beasts to survive. The market for sim products is just not big enough for every developer to tackle the entire thing. What we need is an open source platform that allows tank, flight sim, naval, fps, scenery, etc. developers to create content for. Sort of like FSX but for the sim crowd.
Then something like Steal Beasts would take off IMO.