Well competition is always nice.
Altho i'm almost certain that games with air can and WILL end in rage and tears.
Getting randomly killed by some random "idiot" in a IL-2 and being unable to do a damn thing about it can and WILL be frustrating.
Then again there might be AA tanks but with the current system where spotting tanks is not that easy... they might just shred any aircraft there is with relative impunity because... hey have fun spotting that flakpanzer in thick foilage!
Aim for the bush with all the tracers coming out of it.
Either way, it looks wonderful, but I'm still skeptical. I've also put a lot of time into world of tanks (but a decent amount of time into the planes in war thunder as well) There's going to have to be something HUGE to get me to break away from all my progress in WoT. If they make it so that the plane/tank/ship nation xp/levels carry over, maybe that would help a bit.
Also, I really don't know why people hate WG so much. I can't say I've really paid attention to all the details of their corporate actions, but hell, they seem to treat their players with respect, unlike Gaijin. At least WoT usually tries to reimburse players when there are major tech tree changes. Gaijin has multiple times now simply moved planes around and changed prices with no thought to people who might have recently bought them.
I'll admit competition can keep people on their toes, but at the same time, it can hurt things because it might force changes to a game that didn't really need the changes, or might have needed change in a different direction, all in an effort to compete. You see this all the time in MMOs that try to mimic World of Warcraft in some way and end up worse off for it.