About Hellshade's thoughts of a community P 3.5 mod and the the "nortoriously difficult to program", AI, I'll give you an example of what the IL-2 modding community has achieved, as an IL-2 Modder myself.
We were told that the "game engine" restricted the developers to correct the funtamental AI flaws shared by all the sims that start to be developed at the beginning of 21st century.(ie AI super vision, super flying ect).
When the modders took the game code though and start tweaking it with Java, miraculously the former unsolvable problems seemed to be starting solved, one by one.
Now in Modded IL-2, (soon in the official 4.10 patch), the AI can no longer see through clouds, (the AA guns also), they can overheat nor trim perfectly, (according to skill), can sustain visible hydraulic failures according to damage and many other "impossible" things I cannot recall right now that proved that the developers in reality didn't spare any time and resources to address them, (just because they saw no profit behind them).
As I'm not at all an OFF expert, giving this info as food for thought and I just hope for the best for Phase 4...