All of this conjecture is well and good, but what happens if this business with the crewable stuff doesn't go over? If it doesn't bring in the flood of new players and their cash because it's "too hard" or "too arcade"? Will it have been a huge waste of time and effort? Just because we assume that it will go over, doesn't mean that it will.
You have to take chances in business sometimes. The current financial situation in the genre is not good otherwise we wouldn't have to rely totally on Eastern companies to develop decent combat flight simulators. I'm hoping the new strategy of building a game engine with multiple uses will provide a substantial financial base to keep building features and addons to this combat flight sim series and future series for years.