Fleet boats deserve a good sim. SH4 is still the best there is. However there are strengths in SH3 that were not continued into SH4 because of the faulty way in which Ubi conducts its business.
There was very little continuity in knowledge between SH3 and SH4, the two teams sharing few programmers on the dev teams. It's similar to what would happen if Star Wars were made by George Lucas and then the film company farmed out The Empire Strikes Back to a whole new director like Michael Moore, who knew nothing of how Star Wars worked or what their goals were. He might borrow some elements from the original movie, but Moore's movie would have just about nothing to do with the original.
That's game companies. They have a group of programmers. They have a very simple job description: do what you're told. The company chooses the teams. They look at all programmers as liabilities with no unique or valuable skills as individuals. A programmer who worked on SH3 last week could be working on Ratchet and Clank while SH4 is being made and some poor guy who worked on Pong is on SH4 in his place. Hey, they're programmers. It's their business to program what they're told this week.
The result was that the SH4 team didn't even know how many parts of SH3 worked. The program modules affected were just opaque black boxes. Some of them were used anyway with some bad side effects. That means that some things that worked in SH3 didn't work too well in SH4. Sometimes they wrote their own thing and tried to make it work with the black boxes. But they didn't know how the black boxes worked. It was and is a mess. But it's the best sub sim mess in the world right now and for the forseeable future.
Until a game company assembles a team for a game franchise and commits to keeping that team together so learning can take place and be applied to future franchise releases, no real improvement is going to take place. For every new feature that works there will be two old things that used to work that break. It's a stupid way to run a company. But they all do it and think it's just fine. After all, quality doesn't sell games, snazzy boxes do.
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