I think it would have to be hand curated vehicle lists for each side, with limits on how many of a certain vehicle can spawn. It’s the only way it will be somewhat balanced IMO.
If it’s purely year based, some vehicles become very OP (Me-163, Me-262, many american planes, early war Russian tanks, etc) or very bad (SK60, many Russian planes, and many minor nation tanks/planes).
With that, you have compressed roughly 1.0-7.7 into only 3.3 Brs.
ok, it would still face extremely underpowered planes in comparison to it by virtue of it coming out in 1943 irl and facing the 1941 bracket as you showed
Era limit would be inherently unfun and imbalanced.
Realism is not history, and history is not realism.
Ah, so unrealistic arcade nonsense that makes things even less fun and imbalanced…
Every single time… Every time someone tries to peddle this, they come up with the least realistic features to try and justify it.
“We’ll have artificial limits on vehicles to force players to play vehicles they don’t want to play.”
“We’ll have Abrams fighting Type 61s.”
So on and so forth…