People throw that word "entitlement" around. No one's "entitled" to anything. We're (people like me) jaded.

Ignoring for a moment that you decided to cherry pick one line of my argument that was supplementary and not the crux of my argument, Free! does not excuse an object or product's flaws. For free, I could ship you a bag of human excrement, for example (or at least, for no cost to you).

I'm tier 3 in 4 nations, I'm saving my 5th nation to grind once I see a good deal on a premium plane for that nation (early tier grinding is fun). War Thunder is incredible.

Congratulations! However your first statement here does not qualify your second. I'm Tier IV in all nations, Tier V in some, and even dabbled in Ground Forces to some degree. I do not share your opinion.

Since we're having a pissing contest, this was my first flying game. I believe it isn't much younger than yours.

I still do not share your opinion.

I've had teeth-clenching, epic matches—exciting matches, for sure, both solo and squadded. I've also seen total one-sided washes. ...Those tend to happen more often than the close matches. No one is saying there is no fun to be had in War Thunder—we question the amount of effort and suffering it takes to get to those nuggets of fun, and how fun the effort and suffering itself is in the game's current state. That is not entitlement, it is criticism, and I strongly suggest that you divorce those two ideas from one another.

Quite simply: I do not share your opinion.

Last week I had my first realistic battle with 3 squadmates on voicechat. Do you have any idea how privileged we are to live in a time when we can do this?

Gamers have been doing this since LAN parties. Voice comms have been a thing for online gaming for about a decade now. By itself that is nothing noteworthy.

If everyone from day one had access to every plane, spaded, a ton of people would fly a jet too early, get frustrated and never play the game again. There is something to be said for learning to fly first. Earning the right to something even cooler than the game itself.

And here it is revealed that you do not actually understand either A) what I was actually arguing, and B) that you don't even understand what you think I was arguing. Instead, you'd rather paint people who criticize something you enjoy with labels and dismiss all they have to say.

Here's a rebuttal for a better "Entitlement Generation" article that spells it out.

No one is saying that all content should be available from Day 1 of download. Though, it could be argued that ARMA does this to great success, it relies on communities to fill out their game. ARMA may have a game attached to it, but it's really more of a creation engine. You could argue that War Thunder does the same thing, but their mission generator tools are woefully undermentioned and undermarketed—I don't even know if they're any good. But in situations where there is no grind, or a facetious grind (for cosmetic things: titles, skins, etc), those games do die out really quickly: see Evolve, Titanfall, Destiny, so on.

So there must be a grind to some degree, or you're correct: people would get bored and leave the game. However, I never argued against that, and I wish you wouldn't extrapolate my argument from, "This is a really long fucking grind" to "OMG grinding sucks!" If grinding was just something I hated, I wouldn't be here.

That said, no one is "learning how to fly" with mouse aim. The drag mechanics of the game are laughably bad. Several flight models are placeholder, incorrect, or suffer from bugs. And I have to question, what is this "cooler than the game itself" thing players must earn a right to have?