Is War Thunder pay-to-win or pay to skip the grind?
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yes
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Honestly the best answer I can think of
Warthunder is pay to win when it comes to crew skills.
By the time you need the G and Stamina (BR 3.7~when flying and fighting at 450 km/h becomes pretty universal except for zeros), you’re nowhere near being able to max it or gain expert for the crew.
The amount of crew XP you gain is nowhere enough to gain enough to be competetive. Using sim as an example, most crew XP you can obtain is 25 per 15 minutes of gameplay if you don’t die and land safely. You need 2571 total for G tolerance, and 2571 total for stamina. Just to advance from G 2 to G 3, you need 215 for g2.5 and 275 for g3. You need 215+275 for 2 to 3 in stamina as well.
You can try to speed up access to expert skills by spreading out your hard-earned crew skill experience into useless entries to rush crew level 10 or 15 for expert, but even that can take far longer than the time it needs for you to unlock the aircraft that needs that level of crew skills.
Having an expert crew has serious impact (I used F4U-4 because it has good engine power, won’t rip no matter how much I overspeed her nor stall from too much AoA allowing for comparative tests. I took out the G-suit modification):
Flying at 5.5G is not a monkeypull or a unusual situation. It comes up fairly regularly in a defensive spiral.
I’ve recently been on the winning end of the crew skill interaction. I should have died a hundred times over to a mustang in my bf109G12 and he could never get guns on me, always blacking out. Why? He didn’t have expert. I did. We talked after the match because he saw me share a clip of a cool shot where I managed to kill him in a 148 km/h IAS rudder-kick stallshot.
If that’s not p2w, I dunno what is.
Pay to progress is faster time to unlock a new vehicle. Pay to progress requires all players with the same vehicles should have the same capabilities.
Crew skills means the same player in the exact same vehicle can have different capabilities doing the exact same maneuvers.
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Its both the pay to win aspect are undertiered premium vehicles, bushes and instant ace crews.
Your pay to skip the grind is buying “not top tier premiums” and playing at the br that interests you.
The great thing is you can just play arcade at a low BR and earn crew points that way.