I think you see the point Cas, and of course modern jet combat is all about avionic-assited scoring.........like there should be an asterisk (*) listed after every kill achieved (sorry jet-jocks).

Simply put (and I'm a great believer in authentic modeling and graphics to a fault btw), if we were forced to fly our sims "blind" for demonstration purposes that is, without any data feedback to quantify the experience, and therefore we didn't have any quantitative benchmarks to measure our flying by, then our impressions would be drawn only by the "seat of our pants", by the feel of the flying experience, and how well our mount seemingly matched up against the other guys.

This is the essence (IMO) of "getting it right" in combat flight simming...........you against him, his mounts capabilities as opposed to yours...........it's the dynamic comparison we experience........the mental ranking our minds assembles from the experience of the dogfight that makes it feel real.

If the experince doesn't "feel" authentic, and the aircraft performances can't be reconciled with one another as we have learned to understand them, then our minds will never allow ourselves to totally accept the experience as plausible..........it'll fail in that exhalted task of "suspending disbelief".

This to me is one of the most important differences between a "sim" experience, and a "game" experience. Both can be fun as heck, and you can't (or shouldn't) argue against success, but what exist in our mind's eye can never be dispensed with, afterall, this is what we draw upon to make critical judgements, but if a sim's aircraft seem to rank and compare in their relative performances to one another well, then it doesn't matter what the "numbers" say.........the "feel" is already there.