That is actually a very valid complaint. I'll grant you that. The reality of the game is built around WW2 Era Dogfights in Space for sure. So any deviation from that somehow feel less real than a logical approximation of reality.
For instance, why have externally mounted glass cockpits if the view was just going to be a virtual external cam view? Why not go for a more "Rogue System" type approach?
That's kind of the thing-- Elite Dangerous, and most other loosely-Star-Wars-esque dogfighting space games, are based less in realism and immersion and more a combination of gameplay balance and rule of cool. That's why the ships are all designed for appearances over what would be "appropriate" functionality, down to having a glass cockpit on the front of the ship instead of a "pilot nest" buried under layers of armor, and delicate components connected to the ship by thin spans of metal that are useless outside of "they look like those sweet- wings airplanes have". That's why a docking computer takes one ton of internal cargo space. That's why you can stick hundreds of samples of iron, ceramic, and radioactive material in your flight suit pockets while also being "telepresenced" into an SRV, which can be destroyed but you'll still have the samples, but you can't buy another flash drive to store a couple extra wake solutions on, and also why you can dump enough of that stuff into a hole in your ship in the middle of combat to reload thousands of rounds of ammo and missiles. That's why you can carry hundreds of passengers but you can only have two or three NPC crew members, but also for some reason you're the only one with a witch-drive-enabled escape pod that can carry you across the galaxy instantly even if it takes you weeks to get there in any other ship. It's why you can be in the middle of a dogfight and all of a sudden the other ship stops taking damage and then disappears like it never existed in the first place. It's why you can set up someone to courier your Corvette from Colonia to the bubble and back again in a business week, even if it's only got an E-ranked FSD and no fuel scoop.
Any part of Elite Dangerous that you examine too hard will break your immersion. This isn't necessarily directed at you per se, but a more general 2.3 and future update note is that as time goes on, as more mechanics are added, there's always going to be
something that "panders to casuals" because Elite Dangerous is a game. Not a job, not a lifestyle, not an alternate reality,
a game that people play for fun. And I hope up and down that they keep treating it like that instead of making gameplay decisions based entirely on "realism and immersion", and doubly so when you can opt into as much "realism and immersion" as you can handle without affecting other people. When you play Skyrim you have the option of not using fast travel, when you play Pokemon you have the option of releasing any Pokemon that faints, when you play Minecraft you can build your massive castle out of hand-hewn rock instead of spawning it out of thin air, and when you play 2.3 you will
have the option to not play in 3rd person camera mode. One person choosing a more difficult/lengthy/involved gameplay experience does not and
should not mean everyone else has to adhere to that playstyle. You have the option to say "I don't want to do the thing" and then proceed to not do the thing, and if the existence of unrealistic, un-immersive gameplay mechanics makes you feel like you
have to use them, the problem does not lie with every game developer of every game that incorporates them.
Now, if they implement a HUD in 3PV in a later patch? Maybe it'll be actually unbalanced and they'll incorporate an "in-cockpit holo-view" of your ship and the ships around you instead of a little circle with dots and lines. Maybe 3PV won't be as much of a boon as you think because the external view is going to mean your ship blocks things that you'd see from the cockpit and make it significantly more difficult to target other people. Maybe they'll never slap a HUD on 3PV and this entire discussion is making slippery slope arguments that won't go anywhere. But regardless of the direction they go, the upshot is
the game will still be exactly as immersive and quote-unquote realistic as you want it to be. Solo mode won't be going anywhere, private groups won't be going anywhere. You could spend years of your life playing only with people who play by whatever "challenge mode rules" you want to lay down and believe me, you'll probably have a hell of a lot more fun playing with people who
choose those restrictions instead of playing with people who are
grudgingly forced to have those restrictions applied to them. But jumping on the forums and trying to force gameplay restrictions on the entire playerbase for the sake of "realism" will either leave you resentful that they weren't implemented, or leave everyone else resentful that they were, and either way less players means less money means less developers, and Elite Dangerous dies before it gets to the game we all want it to be someday.
