If you read between the lines, complaints about AP boil down to one thing, that the damage is not consistent, “yellow gunners” etc etc. People are moderately skilled enough to aim for what they want, hence the yellow damage, but are let down by the damage; The issues that people talk about, aren’t the actual issues of AP shells, such as the lack of AoE damage, e.g. shooting at the cupola to nuke the tank whereas AP shells won’t do much.
If you spent some minutes shooting the target tanks at the test drive, you will notice that the AP shells are perfectly fine; you don’t really need to aim direct hits, the spalling is wide and powerful enough to cripple targets that are indirectly involved.
An example of 3BM8 being shot in the driver hatch of IS-2, killing all crews. In practice, this will only kill the loader and driver.
I believe the actual issue is the crew health skill.
They are solely responsible for the “low AP damage” phenomenon that we can see in APCR, APDS and HEAT. If AP shells performed as in the test drive (no crew health skill modifier), then no one would complain at all.