You might get lucky with someone hitting there, but they’ll normally just shoot your turret ring. From my experience, the Leopard 2A4 is much tankier than the M1 Abrams.
Yes, but they share similar mobility. The problem is that the 9.3 vehicles have no way to realistically win a fight against a T-80UD under normal circumstances.
It’s certainly possible, I’ve killed a ton myself, but the reason why they moved up 10.3 MBTs to 10.7 was to specifically fix this issue. The T-80UD is significantly more capable than the T-72AV in most aspects. The T-80B and the T-80UD should probably be the same BR.
M1’s UFP is an auto bounce zone and if you shoot on the sides of the LFP there’s a high chance external fuel tanks will eat the round completely, so you’re basically left with aiming at the middle in hopes to get his driver + engine.
Gunner’s side of the turret is pretty weak for both tanks, so shooting them there is an option as well.
So I think your experience varies greatly from objective truth, M1 is just as tanky as 2A4.
How ?
You can kill T-80UD the same way you’ll kill stuff like T-64B, T-72Bs, TURMS and even T-72A in many cases. So let’s move them up as well so poor 9.3s don’t suffer ?
Decompression should happen, but moving up single vehicles just because they’re strong in downtiers because of one of their only pros (armor) is a great way to nerf perfectly fine vehicles.
You lose a lot of mobility and thermals for a 0.6s faster reload ? No thanks.