I have come to realize that the current state of balance between close air support and SPAA is absurd. Additionally, CAS is, in BR, paired extremely ahistorically with most tanks at the same BR in ground RB.
That being the case, a sort of reset may be necessary. Specifically, Gaijin has the power to make a drastic change without drastic consequences: Moving SPAA and CAS aircraft together relative to all other ground vehicles.
Let me explain.
SPAA are generally weak against similar BR tanks. SPAA are the way that ground vehicles in general counterplay against aircraft. At the end of the day, a CAS aircraft destroying a non-SPAA ground vehicle does not have any particular balance between each other. It doesn’t matter if it’s a P-47 or an F-15E, the ground vehicle has little counterplay, as the SPAA in the same team must do the counterplay.
This means that aircraft and tanks are actually pretty isolated from each other in balance. As long as the SPAA didn’t become way too powerful when fighting other tanks, you could move them up or down drastically and, in doing so, move the CAS drastically up or down in BR too inside the ground battles.
I believe this can be used for pseudo historical BR placement for aircraft relative to the tanks. For instance, currently, the Vietnam era F-4E Phantom II is similar in BR in ground battles to an M1A1, a vehicle 10-15 years younger. You can move the F-4E and the SPAA that counter it down in BR and gain more historical matchmaking at no balance cost.
This applies to essentially every CAS aircraft. Many aircraft are compressed to the point of uselessness as there are simply far superior options available at the same BR, for instance, the entire A-7 family, MiG-27s, Tornadoes, Buccaneers, Fitters, Jaguars, Viggens, and so on. This also applies to many helicopters.
We could decompress without compressing anything else. The SPAA vs CAS aircraft part of Ground RB balance can be shifted largely consequence free up or down relative to the entire rest of ground RB balance.