Speaking purely as a slightly lunatic individual, I think the difficulty with emulating SH4 (which I admit to having never played, by the way) in its "all the way" approach to missions and campaigning is that it is tedious, unless you simulate every last part of the vessel's operation, to play though. Yes, life in the Navy can't all be about lobbing big explosive dildos at people, but the main attraction of naval "simulations" (including for a moment the more arcade end of the genre such as Battlestations: Midway), at least for a large part of the audience, is the shooty bit.
A further problem then arises; if you go in for the full-on, highly-accurate, "as-close-as-we-can-get-it-with-the-available-information" simulation approach, you kill your market stone dead. It's not an exactly heaving market to begin with, so turning off 50% of your audience by effectively requiring them to have spent a decade on a submarine before they know what they're up to is not the most sensible of moves. While it may sound ridiculous, I think it's a very real risk; to accurately simulate the constant work of being a submarine officer (or helmsman, planesman, whatever) is doubtless bloody hard. Worse still, most of that work is probably deeply dull stuff to the more "casual" gamer, while the limitations of waht can be done (owing to time, budget, disc size limits, whatever) will be a drag to those few of us "in the know".
To take a similar example, I spend much of my free time as a voluntary worker on a steam railway here in the UK. It's a long, hard day's work, but thoroughly satisfying nonetheless; however, attempting to play such a thing out on a simulator is pure boredom. Even the best simulators just don't offer what it takes; they cannot match actually being there, but at the same time, they force you to concentrate on what you're doing just like the real thing. For all the carefully easing your thousand-tonne train up a 1-in-50 bank, there's at least as much carefully keeping the speed just below a prescribed mark in order to avoid pointless penalties, and none of the pleasure or tactile satisfaction - or distractions - that are present in reality. All the work, all the tedium, none of the pleasures.
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